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[...] Ultimately, what these asides hint at is the wholly transformative power of the epiphany to come, the one that will make Jeni "a very different person," one who will presumably no longer be subject to the obsessive narcissism of the young wife, her attempts at caring for her husband only flim…

[...] Whether one choose maximalist cleverness of minimalist epiphany-mongering, the deadening result, that lack of "something real," remains the same. If truly meaningful fiction, as Wallace suggests to McCaffery, "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still li…

Against epiphany's overuse in the contemporary short story landscape, as well as its logic of "personal fulfillment," I broadly suggest that in his short fiction Wallace consistently seeks to shed the epiphany of the calcification and stagnation it's come to have in short fiction, redeploying it as…

[...] we need art and artists for our dark days, too [...] If Shangguan's fighter in Dragon Inn represents a fantasy of supreme physical control, Chen's ticket taker in Goodbye, Dragon Inn recalls us to the ungainliness of fallible boies made of skin, blood, and bone, and to the often onerous r…

[...] These architectural manifestations of hypermodern existence, liminal sites through which one passes in transit, include shopping malls, supermarkets, hotels and motels, airports, superhighways, food courts and convenience stores - all backdrops, it should be noted, against which a goodly port…