‘…his day to try to glue what was left of his mind back together.’ →

Sven Birkerts, writing for Electric Literature:

Then I read. I took myself away from the desk. I found a private place with decent light and no phone; I did whatever one does to narrow the beam of attention down from wide-angle receptivity to full-on focus. And I made my way into a density that was, at every step, forbidding—those sentences, the micro-obsessiveness of the narrating voice, the slow unfolding of suggestive implication that Henry James, title-holder in this category, would have applauded. There was no question. This was top-drawer DFW, completely sui generis.

Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading pick for this week is David Foster Wallace’s “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” originally published in AGNI and then collected in Oblivion. You can read it for free on E.L.’s site, or you can drop $0.99 there on a Kindle or ePub edition. Either way, especially for those snowed-in today, this is a great read.