Author David Foster Wallace will read from his works at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9, at the West Campus Conference Center. The event will inaugurate the 1997-98 Reading Series for the International Writers Center in Arts and Sciences.
Wallace's book of essays, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," published this year, is "animated by Mr. Wallace's wonderfully exuberant prose, a zingy, elastic gift for metaphor and imaginative sleight of hand, combined with a taste for amphetamine-like stream-of-consciousness riffs," according to Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times.
Wallace also wrote the novels "Infinite Jest" (1996) and "The Broom of the System" (1987) and the short story collection "Girl With Curious Hair" (1989). With Mark Costello, he wrote "Signifying Rappers" (1990), an investigation of rap and popular culture in America. Wallace has received the Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, the QPG Joe Savago New Voices Award, an O. Henry Award and a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship.
Born in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1962, Wallace grew up in central Illinois. He received a bachelor's degree in 1985 in English and philosophy from Amherst College and a master of fine arts in 1987 from the University of Arizona. He now lives in Bloomington, Ill., and is an associate professor of English at Illinois State University.
The 1997-98 Reading Series will continue with poet and essayist Susan Stewart, also the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur Fellowship, appearing Feb. 10, 1998; Irish poet Paul Muldoon, recipient of the 1996 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, on March 17; and Jamaican fiction writer Patricia Powell on April 7.
A season subscription to the reading series is $15. Individual readings are $5 and free for students and senior citizens. Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis cardholders receive a two-for-one discount. The series is underwritten by the Lannan Foundation and Mary and Max Wisgerhof.
For more information, call 935-5576.
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