Consider The Lobster cover art

Consider The Lobster

Essays and Arguments

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Consider The Lobster

By: David Foster Wallace
Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Robert Petkoff
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About this listen

 Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction.
For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.©2017 David Foster Wallace Anthologies & Short Stories Essays Short Stories United States World Literature Witty Funny

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Critic reviews

He is eloquent, scathing, precise and very funny
Wallace's voice comes zinging off the page, reinforcing the school of thought that says he's some type of maybe-genius doing something they haven't invented a word for yet
A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything
Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight
All stars
Most relevant
Most of the articles are very detailed and technical descriptions of industries, technologies, and techniques which have disappeared or evolved irrecognizably. That makes these articles mainly interesting as history. But the pedantic and ADHD approach taken to the descriptions made me lose interest fairly quickly. I'm pedantic and technically minded myself but still, learning in detail how analogue local radio stations managed their equipment in the 90s or how newspaper journalists scheduled the minutes of their day on John McCain's campaign trail 25 years ago, did not engross me. The article on Dostoyevsky was good. The lobster one is of course a classic. The porn industry one was interesting as history. The remainder of the book (~3/4), I skipped thru. Also: this guy needed a stricter editor, and: the audiobook's final chapter is wrongly indexed (sigh).

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