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The latest in Melville House’s Last Interview series, this collection compiles several interviews that David Foster Wallace gave—including the last before his death. I certainly make no claims to be a DFW expert, so I’m unsure whether these pieces are collected here for the first time or if they’re just reprinted from other sources: the only information Melville House offers in the press release is that this is “a unique selection of [DFW’s] best interviews.”

For the DFW completist, here are the interviews collected in this volume:- “Something Real American”: Interview by Laura Miller, Salon, 9 March 1996- “There Can Be No Spokesperson”: Interview by Tom Scocca, Boston Phoenix, 20 February 1998- ”A Brief Interview with a Five-Draft Man”: Interview by Stacey Schmeidel, Amherst Magazine, Spring 1999- ”To Try Extra Hard to Exercise Patience, Politeness, and Imagination”: Interview by Dave Eggers, The Believer, November 2003- ”Some Kind of Terrible Burden”: Interview by Steve Paulson, To the Best of Our Knowledge, 19 June 2004- ”The Last Interview”: Interview by Christopher Farley, Wall Street Journal, May 2008In these interviews, DFW speaks about a range of subjects, but the ones to which he keeps returning (along with some quotes of his):- His teaching career: “I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don’t like to teach.”- Pop culture: “I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a hundred years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.”- Magazine editors: “God love magazines, but the editor picks the title [of the piece], and they don’t even really consult with you about it. And if you protest, they’ll invoke house style, blah blah blah blah...”- Writing book reviews: “In my opinion it’s far more difficult to write a review of something that you don’t like because if you’re a fiction writer you know how hard you work even on something that seems really crummy to somebody else.”- The film Good Will Hunting: “I think it’s the ultimate nerd fantasy movie.”- The role of footnotes in Infinite Jest: “the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and they get to be kind of—you get sort of addicted to ‘em... And in a way, the footnotes, I think, are better representations of, not really stream-of-consciousness, but thought patterns and fact patterns.”- The difference between his fiction and nonfiction: “Fiction’s more important to me. So I’m also more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I’m any good or not... I guess nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me.”- Loneliness and alienation: “... there is this existential loneliness in the world. I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me."- Writing for an audience: “The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read.”- The role of fiction in our lives: “I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.”