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

The city of Normal, Illinois, has For readers who go the distance, there are dozens of richly drawn characters and marvelous subplots, but even the most casual browser will quickly realize this is a writer intimately familiar with three subjects: addiction, depression, and tennis. He's also the author of a bestselling Russian-language guide to Prague. In the excellent Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries, 2003), Stephen Burn nails down the Subsidized Time debate with the help of two endtnotes in IJ that refer to the M.I.T. I have a very bad habit: I start books and don't finish them. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide by Stephen Burn. My friend, the redoubtable Massey, has asked me to share some of my erstwhile thoughts about Infinite Jest, the David Foster Wallace behemoth that I started last month. (Unfortunately The occasion for our talk was the tenth anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest. Fifteen years after "Infinite Jest" was first published, and three years after I interviewed author David Foster Wallace shortly before his suicide, I've finally decided to finish his most-acclaimed novel. But I never completely quit once I start. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. America: home of the brave, land of the freaked. David Foster Wallace has confected a nearly infinite jest on readers with his brobdingnagian book Infinite Jest and the gargantuan vocabulary he uses therein. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace examines the United States of depression, addiction, and obsession. I am referring to “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” a review of David Foster Wallace's work that appeared in the prestigious journal Modernism/Modernity, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. The following conversation is drawn from an interview I did with David Foster Wallace in September 2006 as part of a series of articles and radio pieces about important foreign writers, artists, and movie directors who were not well known in Russia at the time. Consider this passage – describing types I recognize from life:. Cheaper and significantly shorter than the aforementioned study. We'll be working through David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest', in roughly hundred-page chunks. Its structure is a gesture of at best, indifference to, and at worst, hostility towards the reader, which is an attitude that I find troublesome. I guess I had expected it would be more difficult--difficult in the way of Ulysses, I mean, where you almost can't read it, the first time through, without a guide.