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The late author's profile, written for the now-defunct Play, "constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject" that "still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level," according to the Grantland introduction provided by Michael MacCambridge. More »
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A quick primer on SportsFeat: Every day, we post great sports writing from across the web, both new stuff and classics. A companion to Longform.org, the site is designed to be used with services like Instapaper and Read It Later, so you can read the stories later on your phone, iPad or Kindle. You can find our picks at SportsFeat.com, of course-we also send them out via Twitter and RSS. Every Friday, we'll be sharing a group of favorites with Deadspin. Up first: stories about winning and losing at Wimbledon. More »
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When David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996, the publicity-shy author was catapulted into the literary spotlight and heralded as the heir to Thomas Pynchon. The thousand-plus page novel—whose plot is vastly sprawling and fantastic but essentially revolves around a lethally addictive experimental short film—all but cemented his reputation as his generation's best and yet most inaccessible writer, a position he earned by virtue of his beautifully complex prose, post-modern structural flair, an outrageous imagination, incisive insight into our zeitgeist, and a ten-dollar vocabulary. And yet he also happened to be a man who understood common boredom. Your boredom. More »
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Because no one reads the newspaper, and SportsCenter's anchors are too perky for this early in the morning, Deadspin combs the best of the broadsheets and the blogosphere to bring you everything you need to know to start your day. More »
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"Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer," Philippe Bouin tells Cynthia Gorney of The New York Times Magazine for this week's cover story. "But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different." More »
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Sigh. Columbia's New York Review of Magazines has a lengthy look at the "the short, happy, tragic life" of Play, the Times' much-beloved sports magazine and, for my money, sportswriting's last good shot. More »
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Before we get started, I'd like to say something about David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace, Illinois' own, is the best writer I've ever read who I found completely unreadable. I don't mean his non-fiction stuff that had the benefit of editors who, strangely, had a desire for people who read their magazine to understand what their writers were saying. I mean the fiction. Every word I read of Wallace's fiction was brilliant ... and I have absolutely no idea what was going on. If someone told you in the last few days that they actually read all of Infinite Jest, that person is either lying, or insane. Or both. This is not meant to be an insult to Wallace. The man truly was a genius. Unfortunately, I'm not a genius. More »
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Like many aspiring professional typists, I was curious about David Foster Wallace and admired him for his prodigious writing talent, even though I found a huge portion of his writing indecipherable. (I've read the first 22 pages of "Infinite Jest" many, many times, but never past that point. ) Friday night Wallace had enough of this life and hanged himself in a final act of desperate brain-defiance. His wife found him. Sadness. More »
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