This Is Water

In 2005, in an address to the graduating class at Kenyon College, novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace talked about his own "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" as well as the challenge of looking outward rather than inward. The speech is reprinted in THIS IS WATER. In a world that encourages us to look out for ourselves, how do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This speech captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing that was widely reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times and commented on endlessly in blogs and email. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.