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Frankennovel
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The new David Foster Wallace book is being published this week, and it's much shorter than his usual massive works (somewhere on Earth for the rest of time, there will be someone taking one look at "Infinite Jest" and giving up because of its length), because a) it was the last book he wrote before his suicide, and b) it was unfinished. His people pieced a completed version together from fragments found in random places among the stuff he left behind. But is that a real book? Is that what he would have intended? There have been great posthumous publications -- "A Confederacy of Dunces" would be my favorite -- but those, mostly, were completed before the authors' deaths. This is kind of weird, although his books were notorious for false endings and weird construction, so maybe this is fitting in some way. (Daily Telegraph)
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