Lazarus of the Picnic Table: On John McPhee’s ‘Draft No. 4’
Writing remains an anguished, halting process—confidence an account that is zeroed out each time McPhee files a piece.
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He Doesn’t Wear a Game Face: On David Foster Wallace’s ‘String Theory’
The sense one gets reading these pieces is of a discovery process, the author stumbling sentence-by-sentence toward understanding -- a task to which he wholly devotes his profane, fucked-up, intellectually omnivorous self.
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