30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

We started the week expecting to publish one David Foster Wallace post. Then, because of the 50th birthday celebration, it turned into two. And now three. We spent some time tracking down free DFW stories and essays available on the web, and they’re all now listed in our collection of Free eBooks. But we didn’t want them to escape your attention. So here they are — 23 pieces published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.

• “9/11: The View From the Midwest” (Rolling Stone, October 25, 2001)
• “All That” (New Yorker, December 14, 2009)
• “An Interval” (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
• “Asset” (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
• “Backbone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New Yorker, March 7, 2011)
• “Big Red Son” from Consider the Lobster & Other Essays
• “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
• “Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premiere, 1996)
• “Everything is Green” (Harpers, September 1989)
• “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 22, 1993)
• “Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “Good People” (New Yorker, February 5, 2007)
• “Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
• “Incarnations of Burned Children” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• “Laughing with Kafka” (Harper’s, January 1998)
• “Little Expressionless Animals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
• “On Life and Work” (Kenyon College Commencement address, 2005)
• “Rabbit Resurrected” (Harper’s, August 1992)
• “Several Birds” (New Yorker, June 17, 1994)
• “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (Harper’s, January 1996)
• “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood” (Harper’s, December 1991)
• “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
• “The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems” (Harper’s, September 1993)
• “The Compliance Branch” (Harper’s, February 2008)
• “The Depressed Person” (Harper’s, January 1998)
• “The String Theory” (Esquire, July 1996)
• “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
• “Ticket to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
• “Wiggle Room” (New Yorker, March 9, 2009)