David Foster Wallace, with a new foreword by Tom Bissell
Infinite Jest: 20th Anniversary Edition
(Back Bay Books, February 2016)
This deluxe paperback edition–featuring flaps, new cover art, and a new foreword by Tom Bissell–celebrates the 20th anniversary of the original publication of 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.
Read The New York Times on Infinite Jest at 20
Listen to the NYT Book Review’s podcast with Tom Bissell and editor Michael Pietsch
David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More. He died in 2008.