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Dec 1, 2015 · This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work — essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King, and legendary stories like "The Depressed Person."
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- David Foster Wallace
Jul 31, 2010 · David Foster Wallace’s behemoth novel projects our addiction to passive consumerism into a frenetic future. INFINITE JEST, By David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Co.; $29.95; 1,079 pp.)...
Apr 13, 2016 · Infinite Jest is a bestseller as well as a cult classic. I don’t know if those two categories overlap much. I suspect that, like the Bible, there are far more copies in existence than actual readers. There are more than 1 million copies of this book in English.
- Biography
- Writing and Other Media
- Partial Bibliography
- References
- Further Reading
- External Links
Personal
Wallace was born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. As a young child, Wallace and his family lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, Wallace moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic, titled Richard Taylor...
Family
His father, James Wallace, having finished his graduate course work in philosophy at Cornell University, accepted a teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1963. His mother, Sally Foster Wallace, attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College — a community college in Champaign — where she won a national Professor of the Year awa...
Death
Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008,as confirmed by the October 27, 2008, autopsy report. In an interview with The New York Times, Wallace's father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than twenty years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication, Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant, Nardil]. On his doctor's advice, Wallace stopped taking the me...
Career
Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, garnered national attention and critical praise. Caryn James of the New York Times called it a successful "manic, human, flawed extravaganza", "emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's Franchiser, "Main_Page" V.,John Irving's World According to Garp."Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University, only later to abandon those same studies. In 1991 he began teaching li...
Themes and styles
Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fictionin 1993, proposes that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urges literary authors to avoid irony. Wallace used many forms of irony, focusing on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society. Wallace's novels often combi...
Nonfiction work
Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and 9/11 for Rolling Stone; cruise ships (the humorous title essay for his first nonfiction book), state fairs and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the U.S. Open tournament for Tennis Magazine; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Premiere magazine; the special-effects film industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic Monthly; and a lobster festival for Gour...
Novels
1. The Broom of the System(1987) 2. Infinite Jest(1996)
Short story and essay collections
1. Girl with Curious Hair (1989) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way) 2. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men(1999) 3. Oblivion: Stories(2004)
Nonfiction
1. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello 2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again(1997) 3. Up, Simba!(2000) 4. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003) (Hardcover ed.: ISBN 0-393-00338-8) 5. Consider the Lobster (2005) (Hardcover ed.: ISBN 0-316-15611-6) 6. McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (June 2008) ISBN 0316040533 6.1. pap...
Template:Cite webTemplate:Cite webTemplate:CitationTemplate:Cite webTemplate:Refbegin 1. Benzon, Kiki. "Darkness Legible, Unquiet Lines: Mood Disorders in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Creativity, Madness and Civilization.Ed. Richard Pine. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007: 187-198. 2. Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-5...
Template:Wikiquote Sources 1. Reprint of Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001 essay for Harper'son usage dictionaries and Standard Written English 2. Reprint of Consider the Lobster, 2004 essay on lobsters for Gourmet magazine 3. New York Times "Play Magazine" article on Roger Federer, "Federer as Religious Experience" 4...
Infinite Jest : Sean Pratt, David Foster Wallace, Hachette Audio: Amazon.fr: Livres et œuvres originales Audible
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 ...
ISBN: 0-316-06652-4. Chapter One. YEAR OF GLAD. I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.
