Books on the Wall posts featuring “Words Wednesday” book quote graphics. New graphics added every week, so be sure to check back often!
This quote comes from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon,” published in the 2004 collection Oblivion: Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories 2002. “Good Old Neon” is posthumously narrated by Neal, an attractive and apparently successful American businessman who committed suicide by crashing his car. In a simple first-person monologue, Neal expresses his lifelong emotional torment at his self-proclaimed fraudulence and inability to ever be authentic. “Good Old Neon” devastatingly explores what it means to be authentic or lonely or successful or empty—or all of these at once. Like much of Wallace’s work, “Good Old Neon” peers into […]
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The first post of our new weekly feature, Words Wednesday, spotlights Salman Rushdie, one of our favorite contemporary authors. This quote comes from Salman Rushdie’s highly acclaimed and hugely controversial work The Satanic Verses. First published in 1988, the novel opens as two Indian expatriate friends, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from the sky after surviving a plane bombing. The two friends land on earth magically transformed into the archangel Gibreel and the devil himself. The novel follows the two characters as their new lives both diverge and intersect. Moving fluidly between plots spanning thousands of years, The Satanic Verses […]
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