Just woke up to the news that David Foster Wallace has committed suicide. I find this unspeakably sad. One of my favorite stories ever is “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” a 40-plus-page essay about going on a cruise and how all the expected idiocy is even worse than imagined. I remember when I first heard about him: I was helping edit the magazine Puncture in Portland, Oregon, and the publisher and editor couple who ran it had landed an excerpt from an unpublished Wallace book called Infinite Jest. The novel wound up becoming a game-changer for literature. It’s 1000-plus pages, so if you can’t get through that, try A Supposedly Fun Thing, which anchors a collection of essays by the same name. David, RIP brother.

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