"I HAVE (VERY BRIEFLY) JOINED A CONGA LINE"

WALLACE, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, Brown, (1997). Octavo, original yellow and blue paper boards, original dust jacket. $1000.

First trade edition of volume of collected prose by Wallace, whose tragic death at age 46 left "a body of work as fine as any produced in America in the last two decades," signed on the title page by him.

"David Foster Wallace can do practically anything if he puts his mind to it. He can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once." This collection of essays by Wallace, assembling his pieces on a state fair, filmmaker David Lynch, life on a cruise ship, his Illinois childhood and three other essays, reveals his playfulness, prevailing honesty and his "huge, even manic curiosity—about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century" (New York Times). Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Wallace gave a "soul to novels about novels," and in his "bold and inventive" nonfiction "Wallace most closely resembled Mailer… As a journalist Wallace… left American literature with a body of work as fine as any produced in America in the last two decades" (Slate). Wallace died tragically at the age of 46 in September 2008. Variations of several essays previously in Esquire, Harper's, Premiere and literary journals from 1992-96. Also issued in a signed limited edition of 100 copies.

Book with soiling and tear to front joint, bright dust jacket fine. A near-fine signed copy.