The reac­tion is price­less (and just a tad bit dif­fer­ent than when Halle Berry won her Oscar.)

Read­ing David Fos­ter Wal­lace (author of Infi­nite Jest and A Sup­pos­ed­ly Fun Thing I’ll Nev­er Do Again) is always a plea­sure. And per­haps even more plea­sur­able is read­ing him for free.

Tomor­row, The Best Amer­i­can Essays 2007 hits the streets. Wal­lace edit­ed the col­lec­tion and kicked it off with a fiery essay of his own. Houghton Mif­flin was good enough (or, rather, mar­ket­ing-savvy enough) to post the essay, The Decider­iza­tion 2007‑A Spe­cial Report, online for free. And some unknown char­ac­ter did us all a favor by cre­at­ing a PDF ver­sion that’s con­sid­er­ably more leg­i­ble and print­er friend­ly. Read away.

For good mea­sure, we’re also throw­ing your way some more dig­i­tal David Fos­ter Wal­lace. Here we have him read­ing his essay “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (the text of which you can also read here), plus the author appear­ing on The Char­lie Rose Show here and here. (In both cas­es, his appear­ances come lat­er in the show.) Ciao.

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Philip Roth fans did­n’t have to wait very long for anoth­er nov­el. A short year and a half after pub­lish­ing Every­man, Roth has just put out Exit Ghost. It’s anoth­er book that takes a hard look at aging, and it also marks the ninth and pos­si­bly last time that the char­ac­ter Nathan Zuck­er­man will inhab­it Roth’s lit­er­ary cre­ations. (For more on the Zuk­er­man series, see Salon’s old­er piece here.) We’ll even­tu­al­ly have more to say about Exit Ghost. But, for now, we want­ed to point you to some good relat­ed resources. For starters, if you can’t wait to get the book, you can read the first chap­ter online for free here. And you can also catch some very recent inter­views with Roth. First, Ama­zon Wired (iTunes — Feed — Tran­script) fea­tures him talk­ing about Exit Ghost and offer­ing a very short read­ing from it. Then there is this inter­view by Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. (iTunes — Feed — Stream). Final­ly, here are the first reviews that have rolled out: New York Mag­a­zine, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Wash­ing­ton Post, and Times Online (UK).

P.S. Here are a cou­ple of oth­er Philip Roth good­ies.

• Philip Roth on “Every­man” (Real Play­er — Audio)
• Philip Roth on “Every­man” and His Approach to Writ­ing (mp3 stream)

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David Halberstam’s no stranger to writ­ing big books about big wars, and he report­ed­ly thought of his final work, The Cold­est Win­ter: Amer­i­ca and the Kore­an War, as a “book­end” to his clas­sic on Viet­nam, The Best and the Bright­est. The book comes out this week with a very unusu­al pub­lic­i­ty blitz.

Hal­ber­stam died in a car crash last spring and so, remark­ably, a group of his friends are doing a pub­lic­i­ty tour for him. Authors like Joan Did­ion, Sey­mour Hersh, Bob Wood­ward and Anna Quindlen are tak­ing up legs of the gru­el­ing pub­lic­i­ty trek in hon­or of Hal­ber­stam. Accord­ing to the New York Times they will be “offer­ing per­son­al rem­i­nis­cences and read­ings” in an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of festschrift and pro­mo­tion. The tour will start on Tues­day and run until Octo­ber 15^th. In the words of Sy Hersh, “Lis­ten, ain’t noth­ing like David — you don’t need this to keep David alive. You’ve got to mar­ket a book, let’s mar­ket a book, but he tran­scends that. He was a great war reporter and a great base­ball reporter, and the most loy­al per­son in the world.”

Relat­ed: See our piece from April, David Halberstam’s Last Speech and Sup­per.

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