About This Book
Wallace's second essay collection ranges from the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas to a devastating analysis of John McCain's 2000 campaign to the title essay, in which a Maine Lobster Festival assignment becomes a sustained philosophical inquiry into whether lobsters feel pain and what our answer says about us. What makes Wallace essential is not any single argument but the texture of the thinking — the refusal to take the easy position, the footnoted acknowledgment of every counterargument. The Kafka essay and the consideration of Dostoevsky as a morally serious writer are among the best pieces of literary criticism of the past century.
For those who want to go deeper into Wallace's mind, Infinite Jest remains the Mount Everest of his fiction, while Brief Interviews with Hideous Men showcases his unsettling talent for inhabiting difficult consciousness.