David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
E pluribus unum – Latin for "Out of many, one" – is a traditional motto of the United States, appearing on the Great Seal along with Annuit cœptis and Novus ordo seclorum which appear on the reverse of the Great Seal; its inclusion on the seal was approved in an act of the Congress of the Confederation in 1782. The first word of E pluribus unum is actually an abbreviation of the Latin preposition ex, meaning “out of.” While its status as national motto was for many years unofficial, E pluribus unum was still considered the de facto motto of the United States from its early history. Eventually, the U.S. Congress passed an act in 1956, adopting "In God We Trust" as the official motto.
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. Categorized as an encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest is featured in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
David Shields is an American author who has published twenty-four books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes. The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.
Michael T. Joyce is an American former tennis player, who turned professional in 1991. The right-hander reached his highest ATP singles ranking of World No. 64 in April 1996. He also became a coach of professional players, most notably former world number one Maria Sharapova from 2004 to 2011.
The MV Zenith was a cruise ship built in 1992 by Meyer Werft, Papenburg, Germany for Celebrity Cruises as Zenith. After a career for Pullmantur Cruises and Croisières de France she was sold for scrapping in Alang, India in 2022.
Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic and essayist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment and free speech policies in higher education.
John Fenton Johnson is an American writer and professor of English and LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is a postmodernist/absurdist book written by Mark Leyner, published by Vintage Contemporaries in 1990. Portions of it were originally published in Fiction International, Rolling Stock, Hallwalls Anthology, Esquire or Harper's Magazine before being compiled into its current form.
New sincerity is a trend in music, aesthetics, literary fiction, film criticism, poetry, literary criticism and philosophy that generally describes creative works that expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism.
Lewis Hyde is a scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic and writer whose scholarly work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property.
Stop-Time is a 1967 memoir by American author Frank Conroy (1936–2005) that tells the story of his poor childhood and early adulthood, growing up in New York City and Florida. Focusing on a series of moments from his life, the book uses traditional fictional devices, while also delving deeply into the author's psyche. The book established Conroy's reputation as a writer. In his review, Norman Mailer wrote, "Stop-Time is unique, an autobiography with the intimate unprotected candor of a novel. What makes it special, however, is the style, dry as an etching, sparse, elegant, modest, cheerful. Conroy has that subtle sense of the proportion of things which one usually finds only in established writers just after the mellowing of their career." Critic Michael Dirda wrote, "In a 2002 issue of The Week magazine the critic James Atlas calls Frank Conroy's 'Stop-Time' the 'best book ever written on what it's like to be a boy growing up in postwar America.'" Another reviewer found that the book "almost offhandedly evoked the vacuity of ordinary America in the 40's and 50's."
Beth Kephart is an American author of non-fiction, poetry and young adult fiction for adults and teens. Kephart has written and published over ten books and has received several grants and awards for her writing. She was a National Book Award Finalist for her book "A Slant of the Sun: One Child’s Courage."
Glenn Kenny is an American film critic and journalist. He writes for The New York Times and RogerEbert.com.
Michael Perry is an American author, born and raised in New Auburn, Wisconsin.
Post-irony is a term used to denote a state in which earnest and ironic intents become muddled. It may less commonly refer to its converse: a return from irony to earnestness, similar to New Sincerity.
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories. In addition to writing, Wallace was employed as a professor at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and Pomona College in Claremont, California.
"A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again" is the nineteenth episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on April 29, 2012. In the episode, the Simpson family goes on a cruise after being convinced by a bored Bart. He enjoys himself on the vacation until Rowan Priddis, the director of the cruise, performs a song called "Enjoy It While You Can" that makes him realize the cruise is soon to be over and he has to return to his boring life. Bart decides to trick the crew and the passengers on the ship that the world is coming to an end back on land because of a pandemic and that the ship therefore has to stay out at sea. He manages to do this with the help of a large television screen, on which he displays a scene from the film The Pandora Strain that features a general named William Sullivan warning humanity about a deadly virus.
Both Flesh and Not: Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by American author David Foster Wallace published posthumously in 2012. It is Wallace's third essay collection.
