Michael Silverblatt chats with David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of Infinite Jest. (KCRW's "Bookworm" 4/11/96)

MS: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that.

DFW: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me.