Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace interview

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• published: 10 Aug 2014
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David Foster Wallace interview on Infinite Jest. 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. “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” ― David Foster Wallace “I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.” “What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” "Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."