Acker, Kathy, 20
Aczel, Amir, 122
Addiction, 56, 59–60, 78–80, 90
Amherst College, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 34, 91, 164–66, 168
Antrim, Donald, 63
Auden, W. H., 63
Austen, Jane, 105
Austin, J. L., 41
Baker, Nicholson, 51
Baldwin, James, 155
“Balloon, The,” 62
Barthelme, Donald, 35
Beckett, Samuel, 71
Bellow, Saul, 20
Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 48
Brautigan, Richard, In Watermelon Sugar, 125
Brooks, James L., Broadcast News, 85
Bulger, Whitey, 125
Burroughs, William, 48
Butler, Robert, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, 83
Byatt, A. S., 62
Cameron, James, Terminator, 30, 33
Camus, Albert, 157
Carver, Raymond, 45–46, 50, 62
“The Bath,” 46
Chekhov, Anton, 50
Conroy, Frank, 88
The Universal Baseball Association, 30
Costello, Mark, 35, 46–47, 164–66, 169–70, 173, 176, 177, 178
Crane, Stephen, 63
Crashaw, Richard, 62
Dalkey Archive Press, 71
Dante, Divine Comedy, 7
Dedekind, Richard, 125
DeLillo, Don, 10, 19–20, 35, 62, 74, 108, 156, 157
Americana, 20
End Zone, 20
Great Jones Street, 20
The Names, 20
de Man, Paul, 31
Descartes, René: Discourse on Method, 62
Meditation on First Philosophy, 62
Dickens, Charles, 108
Play It as It Lays, 125
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 157
Ducornet, Rikki, 63
American Psycho, 16, 25, 26, 27, 28
Faulkner, William, 38
Fiction Collective 2, 71
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, 63
Flanagan, Thomas, 37
Foucault, Michel, 31
Franzen, Jonathan, 20, 22, 51, 54, 63, 117, 154, 162, 171–72, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181
The Twenty-Seventh City, 171
Gaddis, William, 71
Hansen, Ron, 37
Hardy, G. H., A Mathematician’s Apology, 88
Harrison, Kathryn, 63
Heidegger, Martin, 45
Hemingway, Ernest, 46
In Our Time, 62
Homes, Amy M., 20, 22, 51, 54, 63
The Safety of Objects, 63
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 35, 52
Howard, Gerald, 9, 92, 168, 171
Hughes, John, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 80
Hustvedt, Siri, The Blindfold, 20
Irony, 17–18, 48, 49, 60, 80–81, 134
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 62
Jameson, Fredric, 48
Portrait of the Artist, 62
Kael, Pauline, 88
Kant, Immanuel, 45
Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysic, 62
Karr, Mary, 68
Keats, John, 62
Kesey, Ken, 80
Kubrick, Stanley, A Clockwork Orange, 33
Lamb, Charles, 155
Leavitt, David, 22
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 28
Lelchuk, Alan, 36
Letterman, David, 19, 48, 80, 92
Leyner, Mark, 20, 22, 23, 38, 48, 50, 51
Malamud, Bernard, 108–9
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 27
Maso, Carole, Ava, 63
Mazza, Cris, 63
McCain, John, 158–59
McCarthy, Cormac, 62, 108, 156
McInerney, Jay, 22
McLuhan, Marshall, 33
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 6, 63
Metafiction, 17–18, 30, 33–34, 40–41, 45, 48, 51, 108
Minimalism, 45–46
Montaigne, Michel de, 155
Moody, Rick, 63
Moore, Marianne, 41
Nabokov, Vladimir, 20, 46, 48, 73
Pale Fire, 30
Newton, Isaac, 28
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 148
Obama, Barack, 159
Orwell, George, 155
Ozick, Cynthia, 20, 108–9, 154, 155, 157
Bloodshed and Three Novellas, 109
“Levitations,” 62
Pietsch, Michael, 93, 97, 112–13, 114
Postmodernism, 18–19, 20, 24, 27, 30, 36, 48–49, 108, 126, 131, 133, 140, 148
Poststructuralism, 27, 30, 33, 45, 52, 147
Prager, Emily, 51
Pynchon, Thomas, 10, 48, 62, 71
Rand, Ayn, 12
Realism, 34, 36, 60, 73, 92, 107–8, 129–30, 131, 132, 151
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 157
Ryan, Michael, 171
Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His
Wife for a Hat, 118
Satterfeld, Ben, 14–15
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, 63
Scott, Joanna, 108
Shakespeare, William, 62
Hamlet, 43
Simpsons, The, 134
Smith, Zadie, 132–33
Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children, 125
Steinbeck, John, 63
St. Paul, 157
Swift, Jonathan, 155
Thatcher, Margaret, 174–75
Thompson, Hunter S., 154–55
Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings, 87
“The Death of Ivan Ilych”, 50
Tyler, Anne, 108
Updike, John, 35, 36, 37, 39, 73
The Centaur, 20
Of the Farm, 20
The Poorhouse Fair, 20
Van Sant, Gus, Good Will Hunting, 83, 88
Vollmann, William T., 20, 22, 27, 29–30, 33, 36, 51, 54, 63, 154
The Rainbow Stories, 108
Wallace, David Foster: on audience, 14, 22, 25, 40, 61, 71, 110–11, 124, 152–53, 175
on goals as a writer, 7, 16–17, 18, 19, 22, 24–25, 26–27, 32, 33, 38, 43, 50, 52, 62, 71, 130–31, 149–50
on MFA programs, 6, 15–16, 130, 141, 167
on teaching, 4–5, 63, 74–75, 99, 114, 124–25, 134, 150–51, 179
on television, 17–18, 21–25, 29, 32, 33, 39, 56, 71, 73–75, 131–32, 137, 142
on the writing experience, 7, 8, 10, 88, 117–20, 135, 155–56
Works: Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men, 42–43, 90–91, 93, 95, 97–98, 106–7, 112
The Broom of the System, 5–6, 8–10, 12–13, 32, 41, 44–45, 50, 92, 93, 166, 167, 168
Consider the Lobster, 177
Everything and More, 122–26
Fate, Time, and Language (undergraduate philosophy thesis), 6–7, 8, 12, 166
Girl with Curious Hair, 10, 17–18, 23–24, 30, 34, 37, 39–41, 48, 92, 168, 170–71
Infinite Jest, 55–57, 58–60, 64–65, 70–72, 77–78, 81, 86, 90–91, 97, 102–3, 107, 125, 144–45, 160, 172–73
McCain’s Promise, 158–59, 176–77
Oblivion, 126, 127–30, 132, 138–39, 146–47
“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama,” 122
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 20–22, 32, 39, 48, 83–87, 134, 149–50, 155, 173
Waller, Robert James, The Bridges of Madison County, 98
Weierstrass, Karl, 125
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 12, 41, 44–45, 91
Philosophical Investigations, 44–45
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 44, 62
Wolfe, Tom, 155
Generation Kill, 150–51
Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 175
Yeats, William Butler, 35