Infinite Jest

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America

Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

"The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." --Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic

Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Published: 02/01/1996
Pages: 1088
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.19lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.31w x 2.03d
ISBN: 9780316920049


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/1995 pg. 1666
Publishers Weekly 11/27/1995 pg. 50
Library Journal 01/01/1996 pg. 146
New York Times 03/03/1996 pg. 8
New York Times 06/16/1996 pg. 34
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 01/01/1996 pg. 80
Time 12/04/2006 pg. 120
Vanity Fair 02/01/2010 pg. 50

About the Author
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.