A student from my seminar on David Foster Wallace wrote this weekend asking, for a friend, what book I might recommend for the best, first taste. Since I teach his non-fiction, my recommendation will bend in that direction. That said, the novel Infinite Jest is a good and common place to start.

More of Wallace’s best essays are contained in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again than in his other collections, and so I’ll recommend that.

And don’t miss what Harper’s has done to honor what he contributed to that magazine over the years.