Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, the two most important American writers of their era, both grew up in the Midwest. Franzen describes his childhood in Webster Groves, Missouri as having unfolded “in the middle of the middle [where] there …
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In Issue 9 of N+1, the critic (and UCLA English professor) Mark McGurl describes the problem facing the contemporary novel this way: What should the novel do once consciousness has been physically “explained”? What happens to the tradition of novelistic …
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I grew up in a leafy residential neighborhood less than a mile from Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs. All my friends—virtually everyone I knew—were Cubs fans. If there are tics, habits and emotional dependencies common to fans …
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The director of four films beginning with Badlands in 1973, Terrence Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard before abandoning a doctorate on Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. A promising journalist and academic—as well as an outstanding high school football player—in …
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The London-based Granta “magazine of new writing” has devoted its 108th issue to the city of Chicago. The special issue, whose release was celebrated with a week of local events in September, promises a tour of Chicago during its “cultural moment,” in …
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David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest …
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