David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's Infinite jest: a reader's guide Stephen Burn
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group

We'll be working through David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest', in roughly hundred-page chunks. I read the first chapter and decided that I wasn't going to be able to get through it without a reader's guide. But there's something else these covers do, which is evident in the little grey box top-left of each one: they say far too much. The web site, Infinite Summer, a sort of internet IJ book club, is filled with comments and information for the reader. The Infinite Jest Read Thru, Part 1. The character of a nation can only be expressed cumulatively, through the efforts of many writers and readers all seeking their own idiosyncratic answers to the questions of life. I am not, in general, a fan of reader's guides. In my 20's, fresh off my first read of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, I bought a copy of Gravity's Rainbow. Each book has an illustrated cover and there are enough intruiging new jackets that will no doubt attract new readers and prompt some of those who already know the texts to think about reading them again. They include Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, Nelson Mandela's A Long Walk to Freedom and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. That said, who doesn't love book Sam Spade is an American original, a complex character who uses an unflappable code of honor to guide him through Guttman's murky world of deceit and betrayal. Once you take the time to of great American novels. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.