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.
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“A work of genius…Infinite Jest is a grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the twentieth century as Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity’s Rainbow…With a sophisticated lexicon and mesmerizing syntax reminiscent of William Gaddis and William T. Vollmann, Infinite Jest is our most thorough dissection of America’s addiction to just about everything, including treatment itself…A wild, surprisingly readable tour de force, a high-energy satire of ’90s America in the savagely funny tradition of Swift and Sterne.”
— Seattle Times
“A blockbuster comedy…No other writer now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow.”
— Elle“Truly remarkable…What weird fun Infinite Jest is to read.”
— Newsweek“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.”
— Amazon.com, editorial review“Uproarious…It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuoic talents who can seemingly do anything.”
— New York Times“Pratt is a startlingly good narrator, dry and expressive, with the kind of vocal control that evokes dozens of characters with only slight but very distinctive variations of accent and effect. It’s a performance up there with Jim Dale’s revered reading of the Harry Potter series or the Shakespearean actor Anton Lesser’s turn in The Old Curiosity Shop but cooler and perfectly American. Pratt hears the humor in Wallace’s work and lets you in on the joke without resorting to overheated wackiness. His control and stamina are impressive.”
— New York Times Book Review (audio review)“Brashly funny and genuinely moving…This one is worth the long haul…Infinite Jest will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius.”
— Chicago Tribune“Brilliant…There’s no doubt that Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless…A consistently innovative, sensitive, and intelligent writer.”
— San Francisco Chronicle“Diving into the riches of Infinite Jest is an exhilarating, breath-taking experience. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature. Rarely does one read such audaciously inventive prose…A triumphant, high-energy linguistic rush.”
— Newsday“Spectacularly good…It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!Infinite Jest is that colossally disruptive.”
— New York“A big, brilliant book…Wallace is a mesmerizing storyteller.”
— New York Observer“Challenging and provocative.”
— Orlando Sentinel“Wallace offers huge entertainment…Only Gaddis and Pynchon have this range. So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain. Infinite Jest is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the post-modern condition.”
— Review of Contemporary Fiction“Baroque subplots, zany political satire, morbid, cerebral humor, and astonishing range of cultural references…Ingenious and often outrageously funny.”
— Publishers Weekly“The author has a wicked sense of humor and a wonderful eye for capturing the odd juxtapositions of modern life…Distinct, idiomatic, wild, and crazy, this book is destined to have a cult following.”
— Library JournalBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System, and Girl with Curious Hair. His essays and stories have appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, Playboy, Paris Review, Conjunctions, Premiere, Tennis, the Missouri Review, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. He received numerous awards, including the Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the QPB Joe Savago New Voices Award, and the O. Henry Award.
Hillary Huber, a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt, was bitten by the audiobook bug in 2005. She now records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards and won numerous Earphones Awards.
Lloyd James (a.k.a. Sean Pratt) has been a working professional actor in theater, film, television, and voice-overs for more than thirty years. He has narrated over one thousand audiobooks and won numerous Earphones Awards and nominations for the Audie Award and the Voice Arts Award. He holds a BFA degree in acting from Santa Fe University, New Mexico.