Rumpus Original Fiction: On Sight
You stood and put your hair up. It made you a different man. You got hard and decided you were why.
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Posts Tagged: infinite jest
Something to React To: A Conversation with Ivy Pochoda
Ivy Pochoda discusses her newest novel, THESE WOMEN.
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The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
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A Love Letter to Fuckhead
If you’re judging your characters, you’re not doing it right. I’ll always be grateful to [Denis] Johnson for teaching me that.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Straw House
“It’s not healthy, how you live. People aren’t meant to sleep all day. We need the sun. We’re meant to live in the sun.”
...moreBooks You Can Deadlift
At Lit Hub, Joshua Zadjman talks about Alan Moore’s Jerusalem as the new zenith of the modern doorstopper novel: What is Jerusalem? It’s an experience you can more easily press on people than explain to them. Moore’s 1,260-page second novel,Jerusalem, will land in bookstores later this month with acclaim, conjecture, and hopefully even a trumpet or two—but it’s likely that […]
...moreToo Many Books
If you’re only holding onto that copy of Infinite Jest to prove that you finished it, it might be time to let go. At The Awl, Nell Beram offers tips for spring-cleaning your book collection: “But what if I like those books?” you say. Well, then check them out at your library.
...moreThe Desire for Distraction
For The Millions, Mike Broida revisits David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, arguing that the work’s claims about addiction and the media presaged the influence of “television culture” on the digital age: The final “joke” of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to be almost as endless and mirthful as the addictions it depicts. To miss the desperate worshipping hidden […]
...moreMore Magic Than Movies
Books live in our collective unconscious as well as our individual imaginations. It’s best to air these stories occasionally so that we may examine the myths we hold dearly. Movies may be messy but they can be viewed en masse, which makes them the perfect medium for this analysis. But there’s a bigger reason we […]
...moreWaiting for Wallace
Despite its “near-canonical” status in America, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is taking its sweet time in the translation process. So far, it has only been translated into five other languages. At Lit Hub, Scott Esposito spoke to writers and translators to get a feel for how non-English-speaking readers have received Wallace’s opus.
...moreTennis, Both Metaphor and Not
The writer, existing only in reflection, is of all beings most excluded from the highest realms. Over at the New Yorker, John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about the prominence of tennis in the works of David Foster Wallace—in both Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction, tennis is the writer’s most apparently revisited subject, and for good reason, as […]
...moreReally Good Fiction
Infinite Jest recently turned twenty, a birthday so momentous it merited a new edition of the tome for college students to display on their bedside tables. In light of the renewed discussion about David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, D.T. Max reminds disciples that he also wrote some other stuff: Alongside his first collection, “Girl with […]
...moreThe Library, and Step on It
Four days ago, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest turned twenty; if you had been reading a page a day since it came out, by now you could have read it over 6.5 times. Despite its age and length, the novel still enjoys massive cultural relevance. Tom Bissell has a Sierpinski-triangle-shaped appraisal of Jest’s legacy: “It […]
...moreInfinite Cover Redesigns
The Millions shows us the new fan-designed cover for the 20th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, as well as a short and sweet interview with Wallace’s editor and Little, Brown CEO Michael Pietsch.
...moreI Would Have Done That. Instead.
For most readers, Infinite Jest is or was a formidable challenge looming in the future or receding in the past. But in the shadow of greater obstacles, it makes a decent distraction: I was the same depressed, anxious woman I had been three days earlier, only now I had read Infinite Jest.
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Against Realism
What is it Ferrante has that American fiction lacks?
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
...moreGot to Pg. 359 and Stopped Reading
So why has Infinite Jest, supposedly such an influential novel, become a paper weight, a talking point, a bench-mark of high- and low-brow intellectuality? Why has no one (or, more accurately, why does everyone think that no one) has actually read the thing? Jonathan Russell Clark has something to say: a little slap on the […]
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The Last Poems I Loved: John Berryman’s Dream Songs #265 and #279
I have a tendency to read difficult books when my life is difficult.
...moreThis Incredible Writer and Thinker and Person
For The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark covers Little Brown’s new The David Foster Wallace Reader, touching upon what he calls the writer’s “metanonfiction.” He also discusses, among other things, his hopes for the volume: … if this “Reader” accomplishes anything, it would be wonderful if some new Wallace fans emerged from its publication. For Wallace […]
...moreGotta Serve Somebody
In an excerpt from his recently released book Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, Adam Kirsch positions David Foster Wallace as a quintessentially American writer: self-conscious and ironic, but at the same time frenzied, earnest, and above all contradictory: A clue to the answer can be found in a question Wallace asked in […]
...moreInfinite Brickjest
Fascinated by The Brick Bible, Professor Kevin Griffith of Ohio’s Capital University has had his 11-years-old son Sebastian recreating in LEGO bricks 100 scenes from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. Griffith explained to The Guardian: “I would describe a scene to him and he would recreate it in a way that suited his vision. All the scenes […]
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“The.” “Dialogue?” “Novel!”
Dialogue novels and stories are worth reading not simply because of their unique structures, but because of how they engage us.
...moreHow Many Words Are in Ulysses?
265,222. In Infinite Jest? 483,994. Curious how many words other famous works of literature contain? Take a look at this infographic over at Electric Literature, where you can learn about some of the longest stories, the shortest stories, and plenty in between.
...moreA Virtual Tour Of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
Attention All David Foster Wallace Fans, Writer William Beutler is compiling real life Boston, MA locations featured in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “About each I will write some 300–500 words, endeavoring to say something interesting about the role a given location plays in the story, how it appears in the present day, and what it […]
...moreBoredom as Religious Experience: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
Reviewing The Pale King is a difficult process, for a number of reasons. The most obvious of which include that it is a last novel (though we wish it weren’t) whose author isn’t alive to see its publication (though we wish that weren’t true) and it is an unfinished novel, whose author’s own intended shape is unknown.
...moreInfinite Summer Roundup
I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like to participate and somehow haven’t heard of it yet, there’s still enough time to catch up with the other participants! First, there’s the website itself: […]
...moreInfinite Summer
Infinite Summer is a Web site presenting the world with the following challenge/life-better-maker: “Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week.” Plus endnotes. The site features notable participants and four guides/writers, “who have never before read Infinite Jest [and] […]
...moreA Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.” – Infinite Jest
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