Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive
About Emdashes | Email us
Features & Columns:
Headline Shooter
On the Spot
Looked Into
Martin Schneider writes:
On the New Yorker website, fiction editor Deborah Treisman contributes a thoughtful postscript about David Foster Wallace. I particularly like that Treisman discusses Wallace from her perspective as a fiction editor. He made ample reference in his footnotes to his bouts of intractability when it came to having his work edited, and the glimpses Treisman permits us into that process sound very consistent with that.
Wallace's four works published in The New Yorker are also available:
"Several Birds," June 27, 1994
"An Interval," January 30, 1995
"Asset," June 21, 1999
"Good People," February 5, 2007
Hello! We're a small band of media enthusiasts, culture addicts, and journalists based in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Emdashes, formerly a New Yorker fan site, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, politics, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.
You'd like to know more about the writers and artists and what our column titles mean? We live to serve!
We welcome tips, questions, comments, and corrections, and are always on the lookout for ardent, obsessive new contributors. Click here to email us.
We host occasional book giveaways. Publishers, please email us for our postal address.
Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.
Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.
The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.
Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
Everything you tell or send us is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
Comments
Thanks for this, Martin. You’re right: the glimpse into Deborah Treisman offers into Wallace’s attitudes about the craft and his own work is revealing, and different from anything else I’ve seen.
I will say, though, that I’m surprised any of his work appeared on Treisman’s watch. I’ll have to check it out.