Writer David Foster Wallace Found Dead

(NEWSER) - British author JG Ballard died this morning "with great sadness" after many years of poor health, his agent said today. The 78-year-old novelist and short story writer was most famous for his semi-autobiographical book Empire of the Sun, later made into a film by Steven Spielberg, and his controversial novel Crash, adapted for the screen by David Cronenberg. More»

In Pale King , deceased writer 'didn't want to do the old tricks'

(NEWSER) - David Foster Wallace fans can get a glimpse of the deceased writer’s unfinished novel tomorrow, when the New Yorker publishes an excerpt from The Pale King, the Washington Post reports. Wallace, who killed himself last fall, had been working on the book for years. The magazine will also run an article tracing The Pale King’s saga. More»

Infinite Jest author was an 'astute observer' and 'prose magician'

(NEWSER) - David Foster Wallace was remembered today as a complex novelist who engaged in layer upon layer of self-examination. The author of Infinite Jest "wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on," Laura Miller writes in Salon. Wallace's suicide remains a mystery, "but any reader can see how his fiction had, in recent years, moved into greater darkness." More»

The Corrections, Infinite Jest make the New York Times list

(NEWSER) - So, you've read The Corrections? And Infinite Jest? Yes, me too. And the entire Newser staff also likes them. Because there are certain books we simply lie about, as the New York Times learned during a survey of its own staff. Posted anonymously, the Times list includes:

• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. “I couldn’t finish it," admits one Times staffer, "but I have left that detail out in certain conversations.”

David Foster Wallace, Karen Russell, Denis Johnson were considered

(NEWSER) - For the first time in 35 years, no Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded —but that doesn't mean no works of fiction were considered. The Pulitzer jurors narrowed down the possibilities to three novels … and then the Pulitzer board decided, "after lengthy consideration," not to give the prize to any of them, since none received a majority of votes from the panel. The books that almost made it, per the BBC : The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, Swamplandia by Karen Russell, and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. More»