This week marks David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday and you’ll see a slew of DFW-related postings on the web for your time consuming readerly pleasure.

Open Culture did some excellent work by sharing “30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web”. Some personal favorites —

• “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “On Life and Work” (Wall Street Journal: Kenyon College Commencement address, 2005)
• “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (Paris Review, 1997)
• “All That” (New Yorker, December 2009)
• And of course, “Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet, August 2004)

For those of us that love visual diagrams about novels, Brainpickings.org has “3 Ways to Visualize the David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest”. The character map flowchart for Infinite Jest is a must-see.

And you can find a gigantic PDF map of “A diagram of nearly all the charactersin David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,with connections and relations shown thereamong.” Very suitable for framing in any college dorm room —

For DFW fans, here are some of the bests on the web this week.

• And what list wouldn’t include The Howling Fantods! Their New to DFW? page is perfect for those looking for a good place to start.
• Slate (“Watch an Uncut 84-Minute Interview with David Foster Wallace”) along with some characteristic meta-commentary:
• “Wallace wonders aloud how much of what he says will get edited out, if he can discuss his all-consuming suspicion that “there’s something really good on another channel and I’m missing it” while he’s actually on television, and how to talk to the media about how difficult it is to talk to the media while pretending you don’t know you’re talking to the media.”
• Have you seen The David Foster Wallace Audio Project? It’s an impressive collection of readings, interviews, and more.
• David Foster Wallace’s letter to Don DeLillo is one of the coolest finds of the week.
• And, perhaps the best way to satisfy one’s yen for David Foster Wallace supplementary reading material — The Awl (“46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday”.
• Personal favorites — The Onion: “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20” and “David Foster Wallace’s 10 Favorite Books” (with ‘The Screwtape Letters,’ by C.S. Lewis at the top of the list)