“…the original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads […]
Infinite Jest
“[Infinite Jest] was about five hundred pages longer. Of which four hundred unambiguously needed to go, and the other hundred was painful. “That’s like losing […]
Wallace himself wrote, in my correspondence with him: “I too believe that most of the problems of what might be called ‘the tyranny of irony’ […]
IDEAS: Do you miss Boston? WALLACE: I miss parts of Brighton and Allston and the Back Bay very much. But I lived there for only […]
“Perhaps the greatest example of this movement between [narrative] registers, however, is the phrase Infinite Jest itself. Over the course of the novel it moves […]
“Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world […]
“Whatever the explanation for his preoccupation with solipsism in Wittgenstein, Wallace never abandoned his fixation on sealed-off people. Few readers of Infinite Jest will forget […]
“[Michael] Pietsch was also still worried about how the parts [of Infinite Jest] fit together…Wallace insisted that the answers all existed, but just past the […]