Having gained enormous popularity both as a best-selling author and in more conservative academic circles after the publication of his 1996 mammoth novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace has rapidly risen to the status of canonical writer. Following the wide acclaim received by his magnum opus, numerous works on his philosophical writings, essays and fiction have flooded into academia, instituting a body of scholarly research that has kept growing over the years. The discussion of his short stories, however, perhaps responding to the marginal status that the genre has long maintained, has been hardly comparable to that of his novels, even though the former offer some of the most remarkable instances of how the recurring themes of his literary production—mental health, addiction, boredom, empathy and solipsism, to name but a few—are constantly connected to that of intersubjectivity and made to illustrate the hesitant relationship that bonds us to our every other.
In the short story...