D. T. Max Book order

David Foster Wallace is to contemporary literature what Kurt Cobain is to music. He died young enough for his promise and his achievements to solidify into a legend. For many, he became someone worth reading, revering, following. How had a teen tennis prodigy turned ace philosophy student turned novelist managed to become a generation-defining star? And how painful was that process for him? What was it that he stood for that chimed with so many? And how much did his, and his country's, addictions defeat him? D. T. Max was determined to find out, and this scrupulous and revealing biographical study, which draws on conversations with those closest to Wallace and on extensive archive material, is the haunting result.

Fatal Familial Insomnia is a rare, inherited disease that has afflicted one noble Venetian family for centuries, striking at random and passing from generation to generation like a deadly dynastic curse. The cause? A rogue protein called a prion, which is impossible to destroy and is also responsible for Mad Cow Disease and scrapie in sheep.

Explores prions, enigmatic brain proteins, and their influence on human life, examining the case of an Italian family victimized for two centuries by a fatal familial insomnia, and the links between prions and various brain maladies