David Foster Wallace

I recently read David Quammen's "Spillover," a scary, brilliant book about zoonotic diseases. Quammen is a marvelous stylist. But I was dismayed to discover, on page 506, this sentence: "One of the things that makes influenza so problematic, Webster said,...

Singer/guitarist Marnie Stern's evaluation of her discography sounds a bit like Goldilocks reviewing porridge. "With the first record I thought, 'Oh, it's too experimental,'" she said. "With the second record I thought, 'Oh, it's too rock.' With the...

Renata Adler has won renown during her years as a staff writer for The New Yorker and film critic for the New York Times. Though her political and arts criticism has been deeply divisive at times, she remains a powerful force in the literary world. Adler'...

Sometimes I wonder how many books I've read in my four decades. Thousands, anyway — maybe tens of thousands — since the first one, about a choo-choo, when I was not quite 3. Right up to Anne Carson's “Autobiography of Red,”...

Here are six books (and book events) to which I'm especially looking forward: a preview of the writes of spring. April 2 "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner Scribner Rachel Kushner's first novel, "Telex From Cuba," was a sensation: Set in the years...

It's almost as if Kevin Smokler found himself in 30-something detention: well into adulthood, he was sentenced to go back and re-read the books he read in high school English class. He might have escaped if he hadn't been passing notes in class written...

On a warm September day in Chicago, Rishad Tobaccowala counseled a roomful of Leo Burnett executives on how to sell high-tech gadgets -- told in terms of hot dogs.     Tobaccowala, who has spent 30 years at Leo Burnett and affiliated agencies,...

This post has been updated. Please see below for details. The California Institute of the Arts launched its literary journal Black Clock in 2004 with pieces by some of the best writers of the moment: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender...

In the fall, I taught English 366: The Essay at Lake Forest College, a writing workshop devoted to the study of the essay as a unique genre. We were not midway through the first class meeting when a student asked me what the difference was between the...

-------------------- Hell Bent Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga Benjamin Lorr St. Martin's Press: 312 pp., $25.99 -------------------- The sweaty, two-year odyssey Benjamin Lorr chronicles in...

Alewives are the stinky fish that used to wash up en masse on Lake Michigan beaches. So it is that we bring you the 17th annual Alewife Awards to commemorate the rankest cultural flotsam and jetsam to hit our shores over the past year. Memo to vendors:...

-------------------- Tenth of December Stories George Saunders Random House: 254 pp., $26 -------------------- George Saunders is often described as a satirist. That's not inaccurate: How else do we account for, say, the title effort of his first...