A Riddle Solved: Audiobook Techniques Revealed

It’s one of those things you never think about until it’s brought to your attention, except this time the New York Times managed to beat Steven Wright to the punchline: How do you do footnotes on audiobooks? And how does David Foster Wallace handle the pressure?

“So single-minded is Mr. Wallace, who is 43, about how his work looks over how it sounds that at his first public reading in the late 1980′s, ‘I inserted the punctuation,’ he recalled, adding: ‘I would read a clause and say “comma” or “semicolon.” Or I’d say, “new paragraph” and “indent.” Now looking back at it I can see what a silent deal this is for me.’ At one point in Consider the Lobster, Mr. Wallace encounters an ellipsis and reads ‘dot, dot, dot,’ which producers say is verboten. ‘Part of it is I’m not an actor and I don’t know how to trail off, and I become somewhat autistic about it,’ he said.”

Even more amusing are the anecdotes of how the producers of the Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close audiobook dealt with all that book’s typographical quirks.

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