The latest in Melville House's Last Interview series, this collection compiles several interviews that David Foster Wallace gave—including the last before his death. I certainly make no claims to be a DFW expert, so I'm unsure whether these pieces are collected here for the first time or if they're just reprinted from other sources: the only information Melville House offers in the press release is that this is "a unique selection of [DFW's] best interviews."

For the DFW completist, here are the interviews collected in this volume:

- "Something Real American": Interview by Laura Miller, Salon, 9 March 1996
- "There Can Be No Spokesperson": Interview by Tom Scocca, Boston Phoenix, 20 February 1998
- "A Brief Interview with a Five-Draft Man": Interview by Stacey Schmeidel, Amherst Magazine, Spring 1999
- "To Try Extra Hard to Exercise Patience, Politeness, and Imagination": Interview by Dave Eggers, The Believer, November 2003
- "Some Kind of Terrible Burden": Interview by Steve Paulson, To the Best of Our Knowledge, 19 June 2004
- "The Last Interview": Interview by Christopher Farley, Wall Street Journal, May 2008

In these interviews, DFW speaks about a range of subjects, but the ones to which he keeps returning (along with some quotes of his):

- His teaching career: "I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don't like to teach."

- Pop culture: "I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a hundred years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in."

- Magazine editors: "God love magazines, but the editor picks the title [of the piece], and they don't even really consult with you about it. And if you protest, they'll invoke house style, blah blah blah blah..."

- Writing book reviews: "In my opinion it's far more difficult to write a review of something that you don't like because if you're a fiction writer you know how hard you work even on something that seems really crummy to somebody else."

- The film Good Will Hunting: "I think it's the ultimate nerd fantasy movie."

- The role of footnotes in Infinite Jest: "the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and they get to be kind of—you get sort of addicted to 'em... And in a way, the footnotes, I think, are better representations of, not really stream-of-consciousness, but thought patterns and fact patterns."

- The difference between his fiction and nonfiction: "Fiction's more important to me. So I'm also more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I'm any good or not... I guess nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me."

- Loneliness and alienation: "... there is this existential loneliness in the world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me."

- Writing for an audience: "The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read."

- The role of fiction in our lives: "I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art." ( )

I was originally going to give this three stars, but I've come to think of it far more negatively.
I think the book is interesting for a certain type of Wallace fan who's read everything in the last two decades, who are interested in his semi-unfiltered thoughts about a hodge-podge of subjects. But that's a very specific type of person, and I don't think many others will enjoy it (particularly since, as I mention later, the interviews themselves aren't all that grand). There's probably something better out there for people interested in scratching this particular Wallace itch.
Look, I've got some problems with the book.
1. It feels rather exploitative. The editor, David Streitfeld, doesn't seem to like Wallace very much (based on his introduction and the interview he conducted that's included in the book), and the description on the back is somewhat misleading—it claims to include an interview "never-before [sic? Is that an error? It certainly feels like one, anyway] published," which, as far as I can tell, is the penultimate interview, which was broadcast instead of published, which, okay, but that's fairly cheap. So, the collection doesn't feel terribly well-put together or honest, instead trying to draw in interested readers with the promise of "The Last Interview." This exploitative feeling extends to the series in general, since the series grows fairly consistently whenever a notable person dies, often within a disrespectfully brief period, based on everything I can tell.
2. Maybe this would be okay if the interviews in this book were actually Wallace's best (I admittedly say this as someone who's not got a total knowledge of Wallace's interviews). None of them stand out as anything truly special or spectacular, and many of them (particularly those from the Infinite Jest media circus) feel awful repetitive. Granted, none of them outright suck, but none of them feel like the missives from paradise that certain parts of his novels often felt like. ( )

"If there's something that's distinctive about our generation it's that we've been steeped in media and marketing since the time we were very, very small. And it's kind of a grand experiment because no other generation in the history of the world has been that mediated. What implications that has, I don't know, but I know it affects what seems urgent and worth writing about and what kind of feels real in my head when I'm working on it" (101). ( )

This is a collection of interviews with David Foster Wallace, which is published posthumously. DFW does these interviews either face-to-face or by e-mail (which he perfers, as he refers to himself as a "five-draft man").

On "[b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1405353951s/6759.jpg|3271542]":

MILLER: What were you intending to do when you started this book?

DFW: I wanted to do something sad. I’d done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I’d never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millennium.

MILLER: And what is that like?

DFW: There’s something particularly sad about it, something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it’s unique to our generation I really don’t know.

On using pop-cultural references in his writing:

MILLER: Are you trying to find similar meanings in the pop culture material you use? That sort of thing can be seen as merely clever, or shallow.

DFW: I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a 100 years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.

On being furry:

DFW: I’ve never had a beard. I’ve tried periodically to grow a beard, and when it resembles, you know, the armpit of a 15-year-old girl who hasn’t shaved her armpit, I shave it off.

Q: I mean, when you have something like the oil rigs “bobbing fellatially”—

DFW: Yeah, except that’s exactly how they look. [Laughs]

On reviews:

Q: Do you read reviews of your work

A: It’s tempting to. It’s also tempting to try and eavesdrop on people who are talking about you and don’t think you can hear them. But you almost always get your feelings hurt if you eavesdrop like this. It’s the same way with reviews. It took me a while to figure out that reviews of my work are not for me. They’re for potential book-buyers. I have a nice tight established circle of friends and associates I can send stuff to and get honest critical response that helps me make the stuff better. By the time the stuff is published, though, anything I hear about it amounts to me eavesdropping.

And, to finish off, a quote from an interviewer to DFW:

Anyway, I remember you once actually answering your phone by saying not “Hello” but “Distract me,” which struck me as the truest way to put it—when you pick up the phone, you’re leaving the submersion of good writerly concentration.

All in all, this is a short book which works well into getting insight to how DFW's mind worked. I think reading his interviews is a way to get into his authorship, even though his writing, especially "[b:The Pale King|9443405|The Pale King|David Foster Wallace|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1324405497s/9443405.jpg|6498897]", is unlike his interview techniques. For further interview reading, soon to be turned into film, I must recommend "[b:Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace|6916961|Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace|David Lipsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320553939s/6916961.jpg|7144014]". ( )

Although familiar with Wallace's essays, I have not read any of his fiction, a sin of omission I will remedy after reading these interviews: Wallace is so articulate and so thoughtful in discussing writing, literature and his work that he has charmed me. These interviews are each of them witty, intelligent and profound. ( )