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When one looks at illuminations and calligraphies, it becomes obvious that the affinity between letters, drawings and images is not just a matter of illustrations. The image and the writing seem to intermingle. Great melancholic authors can create scenes, landscapes or situations which are all the more incandescent as their writing passes through what in reality veils the real. D. Foster Wallace, introduced here through a few extracts from his master piece Infinite Jest, is such an author. He sees the dark future of the American dream turned into a nightmare as a film which kills those who watch it. In this book, freed from the linearity of plot and in the short stories we have selected, the clinical analysis of pain alternates with black humor, the only means to alleviate its evocation. The night of the decaying American empire is caught with the keenness of an author who entertained with the disease which would kill him a close and clinical relationship.