JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

From the LA Times:
“David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

“Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself. Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as “Girl with Curious Hair” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” In 1997, he received a MacArthur “genius” grant.”

Apart from his fiction, DFW wrote brilliantly about mathematics and tennis. Here is his 2006 piece on Roger Federer.

To the person who borrowed my hardcover copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: It’s been years. Give it back.

Tributes:
“He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing.” Laura Miller in Salon.

“David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.” Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.