© Columbia University Press
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
Paper, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15157-3
$19.95
/ £13.95
December, 2010
Cloth, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15156-6
$60.00
/ £41.50
"Fatalism, the sorrowful erasure of possibilities, is the philosophical problem at the heart of this book. To witness the intellectual exuberance and bravado with which the young Wallace attacks this problem, the ambition and elegance of the solution he works out so that possibility might be resurrected, is to mourn, once again, the possibilities that have been lost." — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
"As an early glimpse at the preoccupations of one of the 20th century's most compelling and philosophical authors, it is invaluable, and Wallace's conclusion . . . is simply elegant." — Publishers Weekly
"This book is for any reader who has enjoyed the works of Wallace and for philosophy students specializing in fatalism." — Library Journal
"[A] tough and impressive book." — Anthony Gottlieb, Financial Times
"an excellent summary of Wallace's thought and writing which shows how his philosophical interests were not purely cerebral, but arose from, and fed into, his emotional and ethical concerns." — Robert Potts, Times Literary Supplement
"Fate, Time, and Laguage contains a great deal of first-rate philosophy throughout, and not least in Wallace's extraordinarily professional and ambitious essay...." — Daniel Speak, Notre Dame Philosophical Review
"Valuable and interesting." — James Ley, Australian Literary Review
"I think Dave, foremost among a group of writers that also includes George Saunders and Rick Moody, created a new American literary idiom through which people who are young, or who aren't young but still feel like they are, can give voice to the full range of their intelligence and emotion and moral sensibility without feeling dorky and uncontemporary. It's very hard to read Dave and not feel almost peer-pressured to emulate him—his style is utterly contagious. But none of his emulators have his giant talent or his passionate precision. Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier 'sort of.'" — Jonathan Franzen, New York Times Book Review