Lemony Snicket Spokesman Praises Fellow Alienated Modernist

Daniel Handler tackles the new short story collection from David Foster Wallace for Newsday, admitting "some of his themes seem dated--you know, like the work of John Cheever is dated, or Nabokov or Homer."

Infinite Jest first put into concise form--all 1,079 pages of it--the numb despair of late capitalism's unrelenting sales pitch, with a reducto-ad-absurdum irony that re-created the culture it was skewering. Nowadays, you can get that from any Radiohead song. The world's caught up to David Foster Wallace, which is bad news for the world, since its citizens might read less of him.

One of those stories, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," is available online.