2009

The Archives

Advocacy, Guests
Matt Bucher: Why Read Infinite Jest?
06.11.09 | Permalink | 20 Comments

Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times. I first […]
Countdown
The Book Before
06.10.09 | Permalink | 42 Comments

If Twitter is to be believed (and when has it ever done us wrong?), many of you have already begun reading your copy of Infinite Jest. And that’s okay. As we’ve said in the past, doing so is perfectly permissible under the rules. Ya big cheaters. The rest of us, meanwhile, are frantically trying to […]
Countdown, Preparation
Warming Up
06.09.09 | Permalink | 12 Comments

You wouldn’t run a marathon without stretching beforehand. And perhaps the mammoth tome that is Infinite Jest ought not be your first exposure to David Foster Wallace. DFW’s shorter works are collected into a number of bound volumes: Non-Fiction Collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1998) Consider the Lobster: […]
Advocacy, Guests
Mimi Smartypants: Why Read Infinite Jest?
06.08.09 | Permalink | 22 Comments

Mimi Smartypants is a Chicago writer and editor, as well as the eponymous author of a long-running weblog. A portion of her early online writing is collected in The World According to Mimi Smartypants. She has read Infinite Jest thrice. Yeah, it’s big. No reviewer, blogger, or bookstore chitchatter can resist remarking on Infinite Jest’s […]