Infinite Jest

Critical Praise

"Diving into the riches of Infinite Jest is an exhilarating, breathtaking experience. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature. Rarely does one read such audaciously inventive prose. . . . A triumphant, high-energy linguistic rush."
—Newsday

"Truly remarkable. . . . What weird fun Infinite Jest is to read."
—Newsweek

"Uproarious. . . . It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything."
—New York Times

"Spectacularly good. . . . It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy’! Infinite Jest is that colossally disruptive. . . . Next year’s book awards have been decided."
—New York

"God, I love this book. If you buy it on the strength of this review and don’t grow to adore it, make a fetish out of it, keep it strapped to your body at all times . . . I personally promise to buy it back at full price."
—Time Out New York

"An acidic, free-styling 1,088-page encyclopedia of hurt. . . . Infinite Jest wrangles an enormous cast of engagingly wacked-out characters into a frequently hilarious but ultimately tragic epic."
—Spin

"A big, brilliant book. . . . Wallace is a mesmerizing storyteller."
—New York Observer

"A work of genius . . . Infinite Jest is a grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century as Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity’s Rainbow. . . . With a sophisticated lexicon and mesmerizing syntax reminiscent of William Gaddis and William T. Vollmann, Infinite Jest is our most thorough dissection of America’s addiction to just about everything, including treatment itself. . . . A wild, surprisingly readable tour de force, a high-energy satire of ’90s America in the savagely funny tradition of Swift and Sterne."
—Seattle Times

"One of the most talked about books of the season. . . . Infinite Jest is a sprawling piece of intellectual wizardry and social satire, a work whose largeness alone would make it newsworthy, even if its size were not matched by a display of formidable ambition and skill. . . . At once serious, diagnostic, frightening, comic, and lyrical."
—Harper’s Bazaar

"A blockbuster comedy. . . . No other writer now working communicates so dazzingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow."
—Elle

"Brilliant. . . . There’s no doubt that Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless. . . . A consistently innovative, sensitive, and intelligent writer."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Brashly funny and genuinely moving. . . . This one is worth the long haul. . . . Infinite Jest will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius."
—Chicago Tribune

"Challenging and provocative."
—Orlando Sentinel

"Wallace is the funniest writer of his generation."
—Voice Literary Supplement

"Infinite Jest is a stunning novel, a comic masterpiece. . . . Submit to the addiction and receive Infinite Jest’s pleasures unadulterated, unabridged, and magnificent."
—Book Page

"Wallace offers huge entertainment. . . . Only Gaddis and Pynchon have this range. So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain. Infinite Jest is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition . . . a Naked Lunch for the nineties."
—Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Ambitious and frequently brilliant . . . a raucous Falstaffian, deadly serious vision of a cartwheeling culture in the self-pleasuring throes of self-destruction. . . . Almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we’ll see this year . . . and probably one of the best."
—Kirkus Reviews