Introduction to IJ's 10th Anniversary

While I was working on a review of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers, I was surfing around the Internet looking for stuff about Eggers. One of the things I found online was the introduction he wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I really love the introduction. It begins:

In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction. In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis — that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.

Read the whole introduction here. (And you really should!)