- Published: 06/09/2012
- ISBN: 9781847085887
- Granta Books
- 368 pages
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
D.T. Max
David Foster Wallace is to contemporary literature what Kurt Cobain is to music. He died young enough for his promise and his achievements to solidify into a legend. For many, he became someone worth reading, revering, following.
How had a teen tennis prodigy turned ace philosophy student turned novelist managed to become a generation-defining star? And how painful was that process for him? What was it that he stood for that chimed with so many? And how much did his, and his country’s, addictions defeat him? D. T. Max was determined to find out, and this scrupulous and revealing biographical study, which draws on conversations with those closest to Wallace and on extensive archive material, is the haunting result.
£9.99
This book is very well-researched, deeply sympathetic, and incredibly painful to read. We should feel grateful that this story was told by someone as talented and responsible as D.T. Max
Dave Eggers, author, Zeitoun
Luminously [ties] Wallace's writings to his life, and chart[s] the course of his literary development with outstanding subtlety... [A] supremely understated and magnificently comprehensive life of a remarkable writer... Tremendous
Robert Collins, Sunday Times
Max moves the popular statue of Wallace out of the way and replaces it with a smaller, truer monument... [He] shows a truly ethical self-discipline in refraining from assumption about what was going on in that troubled brain... Nuanced, deeply reported and fiercely sad
Archie Bland, Independent
From the Same Author
The Family That Couldn't Sleep
D.T. Max
The first symptoms begin after just a few sleepless nights, with shaking, sweating and overwhelming anxiety. They end only after months of agonising open-eyed deterioration when the victim finally falls into a coma-like state of exhaustion and then dies. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a rare, inherited disease that has afflicted one noble Venetian family for centuries, striking at random and passing from generation to generation like a deadly dynastic curse. The cause? A rogue protein called a prion, which is impossible to destroy and is also responsible for Mad Cow Disease and scrapie in sheep. In this groundbreaking work of scientific detection, D. T. Max pins down this most mutable and maddening of enemies and tells a story that is at once enlightening and spell-binding.
D.T. Max on Granta.com
In Conversation | The Online Edition
D.T. Max | Podcast
D.T. Max
D.T. Max on about why ‘David always wanted to be one David’, the solace he found in twelve-step programmes and what his use of wiper-fluid, on a car ride with Jonathan Franzen, reveals about his prose style.
