“Leyner and Vollman and Daitch, Amy Homes, Jon Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Rick Powers, even McInerney and Leavitt” (Source. BTW, I’m just finishing up my first Mark Leyner book, was somewhat disappointed with Amy Homes, and have become a big Franzen fan.)
4 thoughts on “An off-hand list of authors that David Foster Wallace mentioned admiring during an interview, which has been dominating my reading list recently”
Comments are closed.
IMHO: Leyner ‘way too gimmicky and short on substance. Dunnu Vollman. Read “The Colorist” by Daitch years ago and said I’d never read anything else; don’t remember why. A.M. Homes (never heard her referred to as “Amy”) is fabulous and I’ve read every word. Ditto franzen, who is in many respects similar to Wallace in attitude and edge, if not style. I read Christopher Moore, not Lorrie, and neither Powers not Leavitt whose work I dunno. McInerney can be real good or head-shakingly trite and I never know which when I open a book, but I keep reading.
Of course, now that I see what Wallace readm I’ll take another look at the ones I wrote off or don’t know.
This blog sux wang-o-tang. You never should have killed off Critical Miami.
As far as I’m concerned you can skip McInerney. Franzen is an absolute beast but is about freakin’ time he publishes something else. No Richard Ford?
for Vollmann, i’d recommend starting with The Rainbow Stories – fwiw I seem to remember DFW really liking the story Scintillant Orange, which was the one I found most difficult in that book.