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.
Infinite Jest
and over 1.5 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £5.94
Trade in Infinite Jest for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £5.94, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Learn more
|
Book Description
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything (NEW YORK TIMES )
Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight (James Woods, GUARDIAN )
He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good (Nicholas Lezard, GUARDIAN )
One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory. (SUNDAY TIMES ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight (James Woods, GUARDIAN )
He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's damn good (Nicholas Lezard, GUARDIAN )
One of the best books about addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory. (SUNDAY TIMES ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
* 'Ambitious, accomplished, deeply humorous, brilliant and witty and moving. A literary sensation' INDEPENDENT
* With a new foreword by Dave Eggers
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
92 of 96 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
The proverbial Book-That-All-The-Fuss-Is-About in America, Infinite Jest hasn't made a big splash in England for some reason. Set in the near-future, the story zips back and forth between a dope-addicted teenage lexical genius in a Tennis academy in the suburbs of Boston, a recovering demerol addict at a half-way house down the road, a gang of murderous Quebec separatist terrorists in wheel chairs, and a film that is so addictively entertaining that once you've been exposed to it you lose all will to do anything else in life except watch it again and again until you die. You also get the experialist evil of ONANism (referring here to the Organization of North American Nations), the death of the TV industry at the hand of tongue-scraper ads, giant feral rats in New England, hyper-obsequious mothers, filmakers killing themselves by putting their heads in a microwave and a girl so devastatingly beautiful she's forced to wear a veil at all times. What's not to like?
But never fear: beneath all the whimsical plot-digressions and flippant deployment of words you don't understand, DFW has a big heart, and IJ never degenerates into the standard I'm-so-postmodern-I-can-just-sneer-and-not-care posture that makes so much contemporary prose detestable.
If the book has a theme, it's addiction...in the broad sense...not just to various drugs but also to entertainment, to sport, to sex, to nationalism. The neat thing is that the book itself is addictive...although it's not a plot-driven page turner in any traditional sense, once you get into it it's hard to put down.
You should know the book is very very long, has 200+ pages worth of bizarre footnotes, 3 dozen subplots, and a whole lot of generally fascinating characters. The pace can be sloooooooow, but you won't mind. Like I said, it became VERY trendy in America a few years back...it's now required reading for the terminally hip 20/30something intelligentsia. For once, the hype was warranted...if you trudge through the (admittedly impenetrable) first 200 pages, you'll be hooked.
Oh and, I don't care how lexically gifted you think you are, you have to read IJ with a dictionary at your side.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I came in expecting to hate it. Comparisons to Pynchon; "genius" shown on the cover to be what seemed a twerp in a baseball cap; footnotes... but this turned out to be a darned good book. Why? Everything seemed to be against it. The Science Fictional element was very weak; the story had no beginning or end; there were endless digressions... but the author really IS brilliant; the characters are terrific; there is wit, (human)realism, pithy commentary on today, and humour --and unlike Pynchon, it's honest humour. (Pynchon rips you off consciously. Wallace on the other hand is genuine. He really has things to say and he honestly says them.) I put down the book (after days of not being able to put it down much) and said, "well that was really worth reading."
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
By GRBD
Format:Paperback
Cor! I would like to tell you that this book is all the things that these other reviewers say it is - amazing, brilliant, flabergasting etc. Well, it is. However, after pushing through David Foster Wallace's interminable digressions and massively complex clauses, sub clauses, sub sub clauses etc, the brilliance could be said to have been dulled somewhat. Nevertheless, It's still a top-notch piece of boundary-pushing fiction, a brain-pulsingly engaging read, and a mad piece of food for thought. It would've got five stars if I could have persuaded any of my friends to read it too. Those slackers!
Read it. It'll do your brain good.
Read it. It'll do your brain good.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
›
Go to Amazon.com to see all 562 reviews
3.9 out of 5 stars
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Infinite Jest
A jest on whom? Sorry, any novel that requires 300 footnotes is not a novel. It may be an academic thesis or a self-consciously post-modern solipsistic commentary on itself. Read more
Published 10 days ago by Miketang
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best read of the past decade
After reading this book I found it very hard, for a good few weeks, to find a novel, film, tv show, ... anything that didn't seem shallow and trite in comparison. Read more
Published 1 month ago by FrankBeynon
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious, overblown & contrived
I could not engage with or care about the characters or events in this convoluted epic. Emperor's clothes as usual, as the critics strive to discover the latest fad. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Cristo B
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book I Have Read, Ever.
I bought this because a couple of people who had reviewed John Jeremiah Sullivan's excellent collection of articles, Pulphead, also liked Infinite Jest. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Twig
5.0 out of 5 stars
Infinite Jest
After finishing Infinite Jest, I read a number of reviews about the book. Most reviewers find it obligatory to comment on its length, wordiness and the footnotes. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Blank Slate
1.0 out of 5 stars
A rare book indeed
I read a lot and there are very few books I've started and not finished. Infinite Jest joins Midnight's Children and a handful of others on the shelf of shame. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Richard O. Kinley
5.0 out of 5 stars
Infinite Thought
I began reading Infinite Jest on a suggestion of a friend who I had asked to recommend me not something long or in any terms a classic in conventional literature terms, but a... Read more
Published 5 months ago by K. R. Donnan
5.0 out of 5 stars
From another planet
So here I am at last, ready to comment on my experience of Infinite Jest. I feel I must be humble, as one should be when facing something that defies comments and descriptions. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Nikolaos Oikonomidis
1.0 out of 5 stars
Waste of time.
This guy David Foster Wallace was tragically a headcase on drugs, how anyone can say this is wonderful, very humorous, and is the mark of a literary genius, must have a very weird... Read more
Published 8 months ago by mike
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ace
An outstanding book, the best I've read.
It has 3 threads and sets of characters, an elite tennis school, a halfway house for addicts and a terrorist group. Read more
It has 3 threads and sets of characters, an elite tennis school, a halfway house for addicts and a terrorist group. Read more
Published 8 months ago by iz
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
