David Foster Wallace, author of such books as Infinite Jest, Girl With Curious Hair, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, is dead, of suicide.

Not sure how this news hits me — I greatly enjoyed Wallace’s essays and short stories. Infinite Jest was something I struggled to finish, and ultimately abandoned, but I appreciate his talents and the things he brought to literary fiction (such as copious footnotes). He certainly had great ideas and a unique command of language — he was a huge young literary star in the mid-1990′s only to be supplanted by David Eggers, Michael Chabon and the young writers of the McSweeny’s movement. But you couldn’t have had McSweeny’s without Wallace to pave the way.

One wonders why he decided to take his own life. It’s saddening, and of course, it adds to my overall sense of melancholy.