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Infinite Jest | 
| Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $17.99
Buy Used: $10.00
You Save: $7.99 (44%)
New (41) Used (11) from $10.00
Rating:  353 reviews
Sales Rank: 356
Media: Paperback
Edition: 10 Anv
Pages: 1104
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.8
ISBN: 0316066524
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.083
EAN: 9780316066525
ASIN: 0316066524
Publication Date: November 13, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System. 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 pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.
Product Description
In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novelThe Broom of the System.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 pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 348 more reviews...
 Possibly the best book ever written. November 30, 2008
Sam111111 (Chicago, IL, far away from you most likely)
In any case, that's what I tell people who ask me which book is my favorite: this happens more often than you'd think, as I work in a bookstore.
I first read Infinite Jest in the middle of high school: it was assigned reading for one of my classes [an optional class, but I'd thought the book was interesting, and the teacher who taught that class had given me a hearty recommendation]. I read it during every waking moment I could, straight through, for three weeks: flipping back and forth between footnotes and endnotes, starving, wanting more, no matter what the cost, really. Yes ... I, unlike many people here, read Infinite Jest straight through, pretty much without taking a breather. [I continued going to classes, and I did between 5 and 10 minutes of homework a night. And I ate, very, very quickly.] And what this book gives you ... DFW uses the omniscient narrator throughout the story to guide you through its' different tones, from sadness to happiness and back again. The book is extremely funny. One part in particular [the Eschaton part] had me laughing nearly the entire time. The book has countless characters and none of them vfeel contrived or flat in any way: they're all fleshed out, somehow, ancillary scene stacking on top of each other, everything described so perfectly it makes your eyes pop out of your head and your mind revolt [or try to pretend to be like him]. The things DFW can do with a sentence are incredible. Perhaps part of what made this book resonate so strongly to me is that I, at the time I was reading it, was a tennis player in high school who has been ... thinking about philosophical doggerel most of my life. Everything seemed so ... relatable. It was as though the book was written for me and me alone, and after I read it once I started flipping through to odd places and read from there. I can pick up the story thread from pretty much any place in the book, now, and know where I am. The world is so consistent and brilliantly written, and the characters express the depths of emotion, and the things that happen aren't just things oddly thrown into the world to make his characters do stuff: they're important, they all show things about the characters that they're in. The book is over a thousand pages, and every sentence feels important.
This review is far worse than the book. For a while I've refrained from posting a review because it would have such a lack of eloquence ... I can't really think straight when it comes to this book. I've owned it for four years, and ordered another copy just so that I could loan the first out to people [as I'd been loaning the first copy out to people anyways, but it wasn't getting back to me]. The narrator here is alive: and he is showing you. He is showing you the world, and all you have to do is listen for a while.
From DFW's oft-quoted Kenyon College commencement speech:
'There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"'
This book tells you what water is.
 Great book; arrived in shoddy condition November 25, 2008
Scott Stevens (Texarkana, AR)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Of course this is an excellent book for anyone familiar with David Foster Wallace...my only gripe is that (like many other times) book arrived in the mail looking like it had been kicked around and stomped on before it got to my door. Book appears to be in far-from-new condition. This is a battle I have fought with Amazon many times (although I rolled the dice and ordered Genesis 1970-1975 and had to admit it was in excellent and new condition but only after I had sent an e-mail after ordering it to be sure it arrived in new and not beat-up condition).
Beyond Belief November 21, 2008
Glenn Gallagher (Sacramento, CA)
What a wonderful, terrible, brilliant, horrible, frustrating, fascinating story. Jesus wept. It's also heart-felt, humorous, whimsical, and a masterpiece. Jesus smiled.
 Too long, too self absorbed October 30, 2008
L. Silva-Breen (Minnesota)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
David Wallace may have been a genius, but even geniuses need good editors. This 1000 page book needed a TEAM of editors. It is way too long and self involved a novel to be given anything more than a couple of stars.
If you are interested in what all the fuss is about, be sure you know you will be reading it for a while, and may find it less frustrating to take it out of your local library.
Infinite Jest October 27, 2008
David Gonet (Rockford, Illinois)
I had read David Foster Wallce previously. He had authored pieces in Harper's for years. I was saddened by his taking his own life, but upon his death I decided to read as much of his that I could. I.J., as his fans call it, is the first actual example of post modernism that I can relate to another person and explain its basis. I have read all the post mod classics, "White Noise" "Underworld" et al, but until I.J. I was unable to relate it to anyone.
I.J. is an experience in reading. It is unlike any novel that I recall reading in the last 20 years. I describe it as reading on the internet. All the footnotes the author puts in are so many hyper links to other textual treasures. It's intense reading. I liken it to Pynchon in its rapidity and sentence structure. Foster Wallace doesn't have the gift of word choice like Pynchon, but I.J. is just as sad, funny, and exhausting as "Gravity's Rainbow".
Buy this to read at different times of the day. Don't sit down at period of time and try to consume it. I don't believe that was his intent.
David Foster Wallace was a talented artist that will be greatly missed.
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