Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, his long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Middlesex, arrives in bookstores in October, but galleys went out earlier this month, and two excerpts from it have already appeared in The New Yorker. The novel, set in the early eighties, focuses on three characters in their early 20s in an unrequited love triangle: The protagonist, Madeleine Hanna, is a graduating senior at Brown who loves nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and her scientist boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead. She is loved in return by the religiously minded Mitchell Grammaticus. Grammaticus shares some qualities with the author himself. Like Eugenides, Mitchell's a smarty-pants of Greek descent who attended Brown and grew up in Detroit (he's also the character who goes to Calcutta to work for Mother Teresa's charity in the most recent New Yorker excerpt). But the Bankhead character is more recognizable still, as David Foster Wallace.

Lots about Wallace’s style and subjects portend critical success, but almost nothing projects popularity. Why has he earned the sort of following that usually flows to genre writers and canonized masters?

An interview with David Foster Wallace, made in September 2006. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Radio Svoboda and published in SHO magazine (in Russian) and The New York Review of Books. The full text of the interview has never been published before.

Among David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it’s entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong.

I'm spending the week of Thanksgiving aboard Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas, where Internet access costs $35 for one hour. So in honor of my isolation on a cruise ship, here's the transcript of a phone interview I did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998.

So why am I blogging about this now when “Infinite Jest” was released in 1996? Partly, it’s because this year is the 15th anniversary of the book. And partly it’s because the phone call from the editor that flagged me to the significance of my interview with Wallace, reawakened my interest.

I recent began to wonder: What did the Kenyon grads think when they heard Wallace deliver it on that hot Ohio morning?  I was curious whether Wallace’s speech seemed important in real time or whether it was hard to perceive amid the hurrah of a graduation weekend.  This is a question to ask of any event that grows in significance over time, but it seemed particularly relevant here given the themes Wallace spoke about.  “The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see,” Wallace said in a slow, even voice.  I wondered if this same idea might have described the reception of Wallace’s speech as it echoed over the gathered crowd.

You've heard that this is a book about boredom, and the potential for transcendence that exists beyond the featureless horizon of boredom's endless Midwestern field. That if we fight our instincts to distract ourselves from the reality of our adult lives, which are not by nature "fun," and instead pay complete and focused attention to that reality, boredom might reveal to the most focused of us a kind of heaven, a constant atomic bliss.

Except. There’s more: the voicemail. Karen and I fell in love, got engaged on the side of a mountain, and planned a shindig. At the reception, among all the toasts, a family friend stands up with a tape player. She recounts the tale. She turns on the player. David Foster Wallace is saying, Uh, um, this is really a strange and almost horrifying thing, but I hear that a couple, Steve and Karen, are joining themselves in holy matrimony because of my book? He goes on to give a funny, rambling, beautiful benediction that we’ll always treasure.

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no.

Serious criticism on the writer began “in a more democratic vein” than the study of Pynchon and other precursors, Kelly wrote. He pointed out that in Wallace’s case, the kind of close reading of the author’s texts, “traditionally the preserve of academic engagement, has in great part been carried out by skillful and committed nonprofessional readers, who publish their findings in the public domain of the Web.”

The Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center efficiently dispels the "genius" status awarded to the writer, not because his writing isn't singularly and bewilderingly excellent (it is, even in draft form), but because it presents him as a human being, one of us. Declarations that Wallace is in some other "time-space continuum" are unhelpful because he worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world, in an age lacking sincerity, but saturated with ironic posturing.

IN WHICH NOVELIST David Foster Wallace VISITS THE SET OF DAVID LYNCH'S NEW MOVIE AND FINDS THE DIRECTOR BOTH grandly admirable AND sort of nuts

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!"

“MY OWN PLAN FOR THE COMING FOURTEEN MONTHS IS TO KNOCK ON DOORS AND STUFF ENVELOPES. MAYBE EVEN TO WEAR A BUTTON. TO TRY TO ACCRETE WITH OTHERS INTO A DEMOGRAPHICALLY SIGNIFICANT MASS. TO TRY EXTRA HARD TO EXERCISE PATIENCE, POLITENESS, AND IMAGINATION ON THOSE WITH WHOM I DISAGREE. ALSO TO FLOSS MORE.”

Fascinating. David Foster Wallace's Literary Interpretation syllabus from Spring '05: http://bit.ly/9nSA7d (via @rogre)

Before 'The Pale King', another David Foster Wallace book will be released: http://t.co/flRsheJ /via @The_Millions

At the height of my obsession with David Foster Wallace, garnered after reading ‘Infinite Jest’ over several weeks in 2001, an act which literally changed my life, I began going after any and every piece of writing not only of his, but that he had recommended, blurbed, mentioned in interviews, taught, etc. Many of these books also had a profound influence on my brain, including Gass’s ‘Omensetter’s Luck,’ McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘Suttree,’ Donald Barthelme, and countless others.

Hoorah! Publication date and cover for dfw's The Pale King: http://bit.ly/cTCoDh /via @kottke

AUSTIN, Texas—The archive of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of "Infinite Jest" (1996), "The Broom of the System" (1987), "Girl with Curious Hair" (1989) and numerous collections of stories and essays, is now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid for the collection can be accessed online.

RT @longformorg: "The Unfinished" David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest": http://nyr.kr/aTJUZa (@NewYorker '09) #lon ...

Published early in 1996, David Foster Wallace's remarkable novel Infinite Jest quickly acquired a tremendous level of notoriety for its then 33-year-old author. It's an astonishing work, dense and darkly brilliant. This page collects a number of reviews and articles pertaining to the book, the author, and his oeuvre.

This collection of David Foster Wallace recordings was originally collected by Ryan Walsh in early 2009. This website was built and is maintained by Jordyn Bonds.

This gets me to an odd thing about the reception of Infinite Jest. I write as someone who was entirely charmed by the formal novelties of that book. The footnotes, the digressive narration, the freight-train sentences steaming over entire pages all struck me as entirely authentic. (And as someone who struggles with the visual and cognitive mechanics of reading, I found all the surface static to provide, as a source of ongoing pleasure, the attention-incentives that I otherwise have to gird myself with through manipulations of lighting and environment and blood chemistry. For some of us, reading is a highly complicated, vexatious game. For me anyway, Infinite Jest felt like a gift.)

Is it desirable--or even possible--to read dfw's Infinite Jest on the Kindle? http://bit.ly/9BvqTp /via @rogre

dfw's archive is taking shape.

More dfw from the forthcoming The Pale King.

"His syllabus was wonderful -- and yes, it had footnotes. He seemed to be chewing tobacco and spitting it into a mug as he talked about why this was going to be a class where we as writers improve our ability to engage a reader who has zero interest in our opinions or emotions. He wore big black shoes, the laces seemed undone, and had a bandanna on his head."

Nine peers pay tribute with a talk or essay.

"There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down, cut in half, or skipping around. But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester."

Short story by David Foster Wallace.

By David Foster Wallace: "For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more."

Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, by David Foster Wallace.

"When daddy was hanging a door. Exceedingly short fiction from the author of Infinite Jest."

"David Foster Wallace was a big part of why I wanted to work at Little, Brown and Company. It was just a strange twist of fortune that the production people there also get to art direct the books' interiors. And another strange twist that I had a book design background. When Wallace published Oblivion, I decided to design it myself."

"The author David Foster Wallace '85, a towering figure in modern literature, died on Sept. 12. Best known for his novel Infinite Jest, Wallace received an honorary degree from Amherst in 1999. That year, Amherst magazine writer Stacey Schmeidel interviewed Wallace by mail. The feature-length Q & A, titled "Brief Interview With a Five Draft Man," ran in the Spring 1999 issue of the magazine, and is reprinted here."

"The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said."

"He was the greatest writer of his generation - and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind."

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

"What happens when all of a man's intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis."