“A prose magician, [David Foster] Wallace was capable of writing about everything from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve… He once wrote that irony and ridicule had become ‘agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture’ and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.”