A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America, with a foreword by Tom Bissell. "To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one; this is the other." --Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly 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 renews the idea of what a novel can do.
"Uproarious ...
Infinite Jest shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer ... who can seemingly do anything." ―
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The next step in fiction ... Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty ... Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think."
--Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic One of Time magazine's "100 Best Novels" (1923--2005)