Granta

According to D.T. Max, ‘At the time of his tragic death by suicide in September 2008, David Foster Wallace was the foremost writer of his generation, the one who had forged the newest path and from whom the others, directly or indirectly, took their cues.’ Indeed, for someone desperate to escape the confines of self and wary of literary celebrity, Wallace endured more than his share of hype and admiration. This paradox is unsurprising when we consider Wallace’s repeated depictions of bleak coincidence in his fiction. Early in Infinite Jest (1996), footballer Orin Incandenza – the elder brother of physically deformed Mario and hyper-intelligent Hal – suffers a nightmare of being smothered by his mother’s disembodied head; when Orin wakes, his latest ‘Subject’ (sexual conquest) is watching a documentary about schizophrenia. Mediated by Orin, the voice-over describes its subject:

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, ‘Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.’ The 117^th issue of Granta is not short of imagination. Contributions range from a posthumously published zombie tale by Roberto Bolaño, to translated reportage on Peru by Santiago Roncagliolo, to new fiction by Stephen King. In Don DeLillo’s ‘The Starveling’, an elderly cinephile wanders the streets of Manhattan looking for a purpose. His life, which revolves around movie screenings, is a disturbing portrait of idleness. Even the most disconcerting circumstances fail to shake him from his malaise.