Author: Iain Williams

In Adam Kelly’s overview of the critical field surrounding David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), he notes that during the last years of Wallace’s life there was ‘a steady stream of scholarly interest, but more recently that stream has become a torrent’ (46). If we consider the vast amount of blogs, reviews, and think pieces, that have emerged to coincide with the recent U.S. release of the film The End of the Tour – which portrays five days with Wallace on the promotional tour for Infinite Jest (1996) – we can discern that that torrent has become a deluge. Indeed, it may be that we are fast approaching – or have already hurtled past – the point that marks ‘peak Wallace’. Continue reading

American Fiction in Transition focuses on four novels from the ‘long 1990s’ – Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000); Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992); Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993); E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994) – that are emblematic of what Kelly convincingly argues is a significant contemporary literary genre: the observer-hero narrative. Continue reading

In this assertive monograph Ercolino seeks to introduce and codify the formal characteristics of what he terms the ‘maximalist novel’: ‘an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel’ that emerged in the United States with William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) (xi). Continue reading