Finally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Upon the discovery that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop¿ longtime friends David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello set about writing a collaborative essay on the subject. That essay became Signifying Rappers, one of the first books to explore rap across contexts--race, politics, language, and popular culture. With infectious excitement, insight, and relentless self-consciousness, Wallace and Costello discuss the golden age of rap in the 1980s.
Mark Costello, who worked as a federal prosecutor, is the author of the National Book Award Finalist Big If. He lives in New York.David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.
Show moreFinally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Upon the discovery that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop¿ longtime friends David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello set about writing a collaborative essay on the subject. That essay became Signifying Rappers, one of the first books to explore rap across contexts--race, politics, language, and popular culture. With infectious excitement, insight, and relentless self-consciousness, Wallace and Costello discuss the golden age of rap in the 1980s.
Mark Costello, who worked as a federal prosecutor, is the author of the National Book Award Finalist Big If. He lives in New York.David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.
Show moreDavid Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996.
Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.
"A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing...about
subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of
drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise
ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write
funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map
the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could
conjure up an absurd future...while conveying the inroads the
absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are
a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our
lives."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Costello and Wallace's pioneering study is a dazzling performance:
informative, provocative, funny and brilliantly written, an
intellectually wired style combining subtle and original thought
with great wit, insight, and in-your-face energy."--Review of
Contemporary Fiction
"One of the most influential writers of his generation."--Timothy
Williams, The New York Times
"The Best Mind of His Generation"--A.O. Scott, The New York
Times
"Two educated white guys do the right thing by scoping out 'The
Meaning of Rap' without pretending to know everything about
it...Signifying Rappers is both a cogent explication of rap and a
cutting, revealing parody of overinflated pseudointellectual rap
criticism."--Seattle Weekly
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