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

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace examines the United States of depression, addiction, and obsession. The professor also sent me a book he had written that was a reader's guide to “Infinite Jest.” A number of readers had suggested that IJ demanded a guide through its wilderness of pages and subplots. It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception – about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood. For example: I I was 19, and when the reading was over I squeaked out something like, “Infinite Jest really meant a lot to me,” and he said something like, “Do you want me to sign your copy? We can say, first of all, that David Foster Wallace's death is a historic loss for readers. David Foster Wallace, the late writer of Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and a University of Arizona alum, influenced a generation of writers with his hilarious, intelligent, dripping-with-irony-and-footnotes writing style. 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. 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. David Foster Wallace's 1996 magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is not recommended for the casual reader. America: home of the brave, land of the freaked. Then, once again, I got a note from a professor working on a book about David Foster Wallace reminding me that he was virtually certain that my chat with Wallace was the last interview he gave before he died. 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. Regardless of obvious connections and even direct references between authors, comparing different texts typically hinges on some sort of assumption, either on authorial intent or an individual reader's supposed reactions and responses to the text.