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.

the theoretical bulwark for a literature that was simultaneously challenging and therapeutic

those techniques are actually more for reminding the reader that what he or she is reading is mediated