David Foster Wallace Subscribes to the The Believer Magazine with a Little Humor & Snark (2003)

Found­ed by Dave Eggers in 1998, McSweeney’s ini­tal­ly began as a lit­er­ary jour­nal that pub­lished only works reject­ed by oth­er mag­a­zines. But, almost imme­di­ate­ly, the jour­nal start­ed pub­lish­ing, it likes to say, “pieces pri­mar­i­ly writ­ten with McSweeney’s in mind.” Since then, McSweeney’s has also launched McSweeney’s Quar­ter­ly and The Believ­er, not to men­tion lots of fic­tion, non­fic­tion, poet­ry, and chil­dren’s books.

Cre­at­ed in 2003, The Believ­er, writes the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter blog, “has become a month­ly art and cul­ture mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing con­tent unim­ped­ed by arbi­trary word lim­its and high­light­ing schemat­ic draw­ings, illus­tra­tions by Tony Mil­lion­aire, and reg­u­lar columns by Nick Horn­by, Greil Mar­cus, and Jack Pen­darvis.” “The Believ­er attracts remark­able writ­ers and remark­able read­ers. David Fos­ter Wallace’s sub­scrip­tion post­card for The Believ­er is evi­dence that they’re some­times both.” Fos­ter Wal­lace sat down for a long inter­view with the mag­a­zine, and per­son­al­ly sub­scribed to the jour­nal, fill­ing out the sub­scrip­tion post­card by hand. It’s believed that the humor­ous post­card — click the image to view it in a larg­er for­mat — once hung on the wall of The Believ­er’s edi­tor Andrew Leland. It now resides in the new­ly-opened McSweeney’s archive at the Ran­som Cen­ter in Austin, Texas. There, vis­i­tors can also find a David Fos­ter Wal­lace archive, with lots of inter­est­ing DFW mate­r­i­al that we’ve high­light­ed in years past. For your con­ve­nience, we’ve high­light­ed a few of our favorite items right below:

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Read Two Poems David Fos­ter Wal­lace Wrote Dur­ing His Ele­men­tary School Days

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Love of Lan­guage Revealed by the Books in His Per­son­al Library

via Bib­liok­lept/Dan­ger­ous Minds