To fully understand what wallace was up to, the book bears being read, and reread. In a sprawling, wild, superhyped magnum opus, david foster wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel the broom of the system. Composed by two distinguished literary scholars, the companion is designed both for general readers and for college students taking. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. A gargantuan, mindaltering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in america set in an addicts halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwedup 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. The book was edited by publisher little, brown and companys michael pietsch, who has recalled cutting about 250 manuscript pages. Goodreads members who liked infinite jest also liked. It has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel and made time magazines list of the 100 best englishlanguage novels published between 1923 and 2005. A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything new york times wallace is a superb comedian of culture. Buy infinite jest 01 by foster wallace, david isbn. Is there no ending to infinite book because there couldnt be. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, infinite jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of american culture our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our. The internet is full of charts and complicated schemas to explain the whole sweep of infinite jest, but i just came across this explanation of the book s ending by the late hacktivist aaron.
The novel is widely noted for its unconventional narrative structure and its experimental use of endnotes there are 388 endnotes, some with footnotes of their own. Infinite jest kindle edition by wallace, david foster. Steven asin infinite jest is the perfect book for the kindle paperwhite. Wallace wrote to a friend that the fuckers cut by 600 pages from the first version. Find books like infinite jest from the worlds largest community of readers. Infinite jest, david foster wallace athenaeum boekhandel.
Infinite jest is a 1996 novel by american writer david foster wallace. Beyond the ease with which one can lookup footnotes, consider the following. I was talking to my roommate about infinite jest, and he asked me how it compared to illuminatus. In an instant of sudden clarity i realized he was right, that they were basically the same book the same fractally complex narrative of broken meandering plots about an endlesslyawaited but never arriving apocalypse.