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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt,

and today you're going to hear

the last installment in our series

a heartbreaking group of staggering geniuses.

You've heard, in no particular order,

Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim,

George Saunders, Mark Z. Danielowski, Dennis Cooper, and Brettie Stinellis.

And today we're talking to David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace is the author most recently of brief interviews with hideous men, which has come out in paperback from Back Bay Books.

He is the author as well.

I want to say, of course, here, and I think it should be, of course, of infinite jest,

a supposedly fun thing I'll Never Do Again, Girl with Curious Hair, and the Broom of the System.

He is, if you've been listening, the writer that most of our writers have most frequently

referred to as an inspiration, as a breakthrough point, as a level against which they aspire.

So in this interview, I'm going to be asking David about his own work

and about some of the questions that have been coming up again and again during the series.

I caution listeners, I am talking to David in his home in Illinois. It is an outpost of Illinois, and we are at the mercy of the sounds of the telephone

...