In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace's fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics--including Wallace's relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus <i>Infinite Jest</i>, his environmental imagination, and the "social life" of his fiction and nonfiction--contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 <i>Infinite Summer</i> project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center.
