The works of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide September 12, are famous for their obsessively observed detail and emotional nuance.

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The late David Foster Wallace would have been my first choice.

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Franzen uses a visit to the remote island of Masafuera to reflect on a range of subjects: reading, isolation, loneliness, boredom, and the death of his friend David Foster Wallace.

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David Foster Wallace plays with expectations about bosses in a hilarious chapter in "The Pale King, " when his narrator meets Mr. Manshardt, an IRS manager who brings his baby to work.

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David Foster Wallace is having a good death.

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Bottom line: The iPad is ideal for reading headlines (not for longish stuff like stories in The New Yorker and definitely not for anything by David Foster Wallace) and looking at magazines or photos during my morning commute on the 6.

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Though that idea was quickly chucked, several works from that first issue are in this collection, including a story by David Foster Wallace, delivered languidly and without paragraph breaks from an ex-convict, and an essay by Zev Borow about the Hawaiian secessionist movement.

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His understanding of the agony and the ecstasy of manic depression displays a level of empathy for the illness never yet found in a novel, a function perhaps of his friendship with fellow-author David Foster Wallace, a real-life depressive who committed suicide in 2008.

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