I ordered McCaffery's Vollmann anthology because of the compliments Wallace gave Vollmann in the McCaffery interview I revisited in writing this introduction. I spent 14 months trying to understand Cahoone's 600-page anthology of modern and postmodern thought because Wallace made me want to know more about it. This is his value: he creates work for the reader that is fun and challenging, and he makes you want to research and to explore. His work is both self-conscious and other-oriented, so detailed and so clearly like a conversation he's initiating with the reader--an invitation to collaborate--that when you read his fiction, you identify with the characters so much that often it seems like you're an actor playing the roles that you're reading.