What is Lee Konstantinou reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Lee Konstantinou, a doctoral candidate in the English department at Stanford and the author of Pop Apocalypse, his debut novel, just out from Ecco/HarperCollins.

His entry begins:

Most of what I read is related to something I’m writing or something I’m teaching.

I’ve been working on a dissertation chapter on David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, so right now I’m rereading novels, essays, and stories by Wallace, and related criticism. As I’ve trekked from café to café around San Francisco, I’ve been carrying Wallace’s thousand-page backbreaking novel, Infinite Jest, which is I should say a pretty stunningly impressive piece of writing, especially when you learn how quickly Wallace wrote the book, and study how profoundly he singlehandedly managed to change the landscape of ambitious postmodern-type fiction. I’ve also just started reading Dave Eggers’ What is the What. So far, so good.[read on]

Konstantinou's dissertation-in-progress is titled “Wipe That Smirk off Your Face: Postironic Fiction and the Public Sphere,” which “studies authors who have sought to transcend what they see as the pernicious power of postmodern irony.”

Browse inside Pop Apocalypse.

Learn more about Lee Konstantinou and his work at his website and on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, or his blogs (Kitteneater, his travel blog, and his Red Room blog).

Writers Read: Lee Konstantinou.

--Marshal Zeringue