A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace

While working on the novel that would become The Pale King, David Foster Wallace wrote Don DeLillo, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.” Like Wallace himself, many of his readers and critics have privileged his novels as his most important work---and yet his essays are intensely intelligent, completely delightful, and entirely him. Wallace’s nonfiction achieves what he wished to achieve with his writing: to “give CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” At this book club discussion, we’ll focus our attention on two long essays from this collection: the title piece, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All."