"A publisher sent him a galley of a novel by a writer he had barely heard of, one that impressed him deeply and seemed to embody all the literary qualities he had called for in his "fictional Futures" essay. The book was Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City. Set in St. Louis, it mixed postmodernism and traditional storytelling and showed a familiarity its chosen city that Wallace could only marvel it. it decanted a Pynchonesque conspiracy in media-mediated language; it was about word AND the world, realism for an era when there was no real."