The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Notes on Contributors

261 Notes on Contributors Samuel Cohen is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the University of Missouri’s Department of English. He is author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (University of Iowa Press, 2009), series editor of the New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and author of two textbooks, 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, and Literature: The Human Experience (with Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz). He is currently at work on a book project, “What Comes Next: Recent American Fiction and the Question of Canon Formation.” Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Under­ world was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-­ five years by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years. Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including Zeitoun and What Is the What, and a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine (The Believer), and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and two children. Ed Finn received his Ph.D.in Englishand Americanliterature from Stanford University in 2011. His dissertation, “The Social Lives of Books: Literary Networks in Contemporary American Literature,” extends the arguments made here as it explores the changing relationship between authorial fame and digital reading practices. He edits the “First Person” thread at the electronic book review and is a member of the Electronic Literature Directory Working Group and the Stanford Literature Lab research group. He is a 2011–2012 University Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University. 262 Contr ibutors Kathleen Fitzpatrick is director of scholarly communication of the Modern Language Association and professor of media studies at Pomona College . She is the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television and of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. She is cofounder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org) and has published articles and notes in journals including the Journal of Electronic Publishing , PMLA, Contemporary Literature, and Cinema Journal. Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels—Freedom, The Corrections , The Twenty-­ Seventh City, and Strong Motion—and two works of nonfiction , How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. Paul Giles is the Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, and an associate member of the Faculty of English at Oxford University . His most recent books are The Global Remapping of American Literature and Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion. His essay on David Foster Wallace, “Sentimental Posthumanism ,” appeared in Twentieth-­Century Literature, Fall 2007. Heather Houser is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is completing a book manuscript entitled “Eco-­Sickness: Environment, Disease, Emotion.” Recent essays appear in American Literature , Contemporary Literature, and American Book Review. Lee Konstantinou is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the English Department at Princeton University. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire and is completing a literary history of irony after World War II. His writing has appeared in the Believer, boundary 2, io9, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, the New York Times, the New YorkTimesBookReview,andmanyothers.HecontributestoNPR’sAllThings Considered and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year. Rick Moody was born in New York City...