Why is David Foster Wallace so widely read? Why does his fiction and non-fiction continue to raise enthusiasm among an ever-growing variety of readers of all ages and backgrounds not only in the English-speaking countries but all over the world, while describing all the malcontents, dead ends and solipsistic tendencies of contemporary civilization? Presences of the Other counteracts the vision of Wallace's postmodern oeuvre as selfishly self-absorbed, narcissistic or confining and attempts to answer the question of its appeal by addressing it as 'an open work', following Umberto Eco's...