When I heard that David Foster Wallace had killed himself, I felt momentarily sucker-punched. Not just because I love his nonfiction (no, I never tackled Infinite Jest), although I do. I felt as though I knew him, although I have never met him. He grew up in Philo, a small town near Champaign-Urbana, the son of academics here in town. He wrote about our particular spot in the midwest with bitingly funny detachment. Harper's Magazine has made available, in PDF form, the essays he wrote for them. Two of my favorites are "Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood," and "Ticket to the Fair."
RIP, DFW.
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