In April of last year, a baby-blue paperback volume of essays called The Legacy of David Foster Wallace appeared on the shelves of university bookstores everywhere. Around the same time, but before I saw the book, I had begun writing an essay about Wallace, in particular about the novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way from his first collection of stories Girl with Curious Hair.  So seeing the book—nestled on a shelf between two (!) copies of a new Terry Eagleton book pugnaciously titled “Why Marx Was Right,” which seems tautological, like that isn’t the basic premise of every Terry Eagleton book—was a sort of vindication that other people, presumably highly-trained and well-regarded academic-types, thought, like me, that writing and thinking about David Foster Wallace was an appropriate use of time in 2012. On the other hand, I was also anxiously aware that a group of presumably highly-trained and well-regarded academic-types had set themselves to precisely the same task I had set for myself—appraising Wallace’s legacy, the magnitude and form of his impact on contemporary fiction—and had seemingly accomplished the task with a degree of thoroughness and acuity befitting scholars of their (presumed) caliber.[1]