This week’s New Yorker has an excellent piece on David Foster Wallace, on his struggles with depression and with writing The Pale King, the unfinished novel he left behind. Wallace’s wife found several thousand pages of the work in progress in their garage after his death. The book (a partial manuscript) will be published posthumously [...]

Lorrie Moore, on Updike’s passing:
The news that he died in a hospice not far from his house, and the new ordinariness of this current manner of death, made me wonder what he would have noticed and written about it —“I’m sure it will be discovered he was taking notes,” a friend said, hopefully — for [...]

ad news: John Updike succumbed to lung cancer today at the age of 76.
William Pritchard has drawn up a list of what he considers the author’s most important works here.
I remember hiding the Rabbit books under my bed as a teenager, loving how Updike could write even the dirtiest moments so beautifully. His prose [...]

The stories David Foster Wallace contributed to Harper’s are now available online. “The Depressed Person” (first published in 1998) is a powerful piece, now harrowing to reconsider. I’ll admit I couldn’t get through DFW’s Infinite Jest, but I’ve long admired his shorter prose for its mad genius energy and intelligence. Another must-read, [...]