David Foster Wallace

With David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King coming out, there has been a surge of essays and articles about the late writer, and one of the most interesting is this account in The Guardian (those British newspapers strike again!) of a visit with his widow, artist Karen Green:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview

I love this bit about Wallace's friendship/rivalry with Jonathan Franzen:

Franzen was one of very few literary figures with whom Wallace kept in touch. They had both been beset by similar doubts about their work, and about the future of the American novel, which they had attempted to resolve in different ways; Franzen committing himself to "old-fashioned" storytelling in The Corrections, Wallace persisting with his sense that fiction had to be frenetically alive to the way "experience seemed to barrage me with input".

Green recalls their rivalry with a smile. "They were really great together, you know like two kids in the back seat of the car, squabbling, it was really delightful to see them together. Jon has lost that neck-and-neck competitor, his soccer-field pal."

In one corner of the room where we are talking is a beautiful guitar given to Green by Franzen, which she is learning to play: Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright. "Jon was one of David's very, very few writing friends," she says. "He was sort of like a god to David and I think Jon maybe felt something the same about David. And he has been an incredible friend to me since [Wallace's suicide] happened. He feels like a brother."

At the end of the article, there is a nice little annotated bibliography of Wallace's writings.