Reading Order
Infinite Jest Reading Order
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) is the most celebrated and most daunting American novel of the 1990s — approximately 1,100 pages plus 96 pages of endnotes, set in a near-future America and a Quebec separatist group, an Enfield Tennis Academy, and a Boston-area halfway house, circling around a film so entertaining that viewers lose all desire to do anything else. Wallace was attempting the most comprehensive engagement with American culture and addiction in the literary tradition — entertainment, distraction, drugs, depression, tennis — and Infinite Jest is simultaneously a comedy, a tragic addiction novel, a science fiction satire, a sports novel, and an examination of depression. No American novel of the last thirty years has been more influential on subsequent writers.
Where to start
Infinite Jest
Complete Infinite Jest Book List
- 1Buy
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace·1996·The complete novel — typically read alongside an endnote guide or companion. The novel is difficult on first approach but rewards patience; most readers recommend committing to the first 200 pages before judging it. - 2Buy
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace·1997·The essential DFW essay collection — 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,' the cruise ship essay, the tennis essays, the best introduction to Wallace's nonfiction voice and essential context for Infinite Jest. - 3Buy
The Pale King
David Foster Wallace·2011·The posthumous unfinished novel — Wallace's final project, about IRS examiners in Peoria, Illinois, a meditation on boredom and attention that extends the concerns of Infinite Jest.
Infinite Jest — Frequently Asked Questions
How do I read Infinite Jest? Do I need to read the endnotes?
Most experienced readers recommend reading the endnotes, despite the inconvenience of constantly flipping to the back of the book. A significant portion of the novel's content is in the endnotes — character development, jokes, and information that matters. Many readers use two bookmarks or sticky notes to allow quick movement between the text and notes. The most common reading experience: the first 200 pages are very difficult (Wallace withholds chronology and explanation deliberately), the middle third is more absorbing, and the final third becomes almost compulsively readable. It is a novel that many readers have to start twice before the first start takes hold.
What is the Samizdat in Infinite Jest?
The Entertainment (or Samizdat) is the master cartridge of the film Infinite Jest — an entertainment so perfectly pleasurable that anyone who views it loses all desire to do anything else, and will view it on a loop until they die. It was supposedly created by James O. Incandenza Sr., the patriarch of the Enfield Tennis Academy's founding family and an experimental filmmaker. The Quebecois separatists are trying to obtain it as a weapon against the United States. Wallace never shows us the film or fully reveals what's on it — it functions as the central MacGuffin of the novel and as a metaphor for the problem of entertainment, distraction, and addiction that the novel is examining.
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