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'A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything' New
York Times 'Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his
exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight' James Wood,
Guardian 'He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed
with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He's
damn good' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'One of the best books about
addiction and recovery to appear in recent memory' Sunday Times
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet
House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students
at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for
the master copy of Infinite Jest, a movie said to be so dangerously
entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of
catatonic bliss . . .
Finally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's
exuberant exploration of rap music and culture.
Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and
longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an
uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm
for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote
together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the
bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and
gangsterdom. "Signifying Rappers" issued a fan's challenge to the
giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester
Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had
always promised?
Back in print at last, "Signifying Rappers" is a rare record of a
city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With
a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with
David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.
David Foster Wallace was at the center of late-20th-century
American literature, Bryan A. Garner at that of legal scholarship
and lexicography. It was language that drew them together. The
wide-ranging interview reproduced here memorializes 67 minutes of
their second and final evening together, in February 2006. It was
DFW's last long interview, and the only one devoted exclusively to
language and writing.
Signifying Rappers is a fun and quirky discovery for any fan of
David Foster Wallace or Hip-hop. Signifying Rappers is an
old-school classic from David Foster Wallace and his friend and
room-mate Mark Costello, first published in 1990, long out of
print, and previously unavailable outside the USA. A paean to the
golden age of Hip-Hop and the first book to consider seriously its
position as a vital force in American culture, Signifying Rappers
is a must-read for fans of both Wallace and hip-hop. Set against
the legendary 1980s scene, it maps the bipolarities of rap and pop,
rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom, with an energy and
exuberance which is as fresh today as when it was written.
'Costello and Wallace's pioneering study is a dazzling performance:
informative, provocative, funny, brilliantly written . . . great
wit, insight and in-your-face energy' Review of Contemporary
Fiction 'Both a cogent explication of rap and a cutting, revealing
parody of overinflated, pseudointellectual rap criticism' Seattle
Weekly David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008, was the author of
the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. His
final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011. He
is also the author of the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair. His
non-fiction includes several essay collections, including Both
Flesh and Not, which was published in 2012, and the the full-length
work Everything and More. Mark Costello is the author of two
novels, including the National Book Award Finalist Big If. He lives
in New York City.
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views
on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon
College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in
THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their
comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get
ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve
compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as
well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it
became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street
Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and
emailed from friend to friend.
Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting
intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes
the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us
with every reading.
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Infinite Jest (Hardcover)
David Foster Wallace
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R1,247
R975
Discovery Miles 9 750
Save R272 (22%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie - as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel. On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; 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. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novelcan do.
This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite
Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves
once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best
comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Do lobsters feel pain? Did
Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway?
And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in
person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in
essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether
covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential
race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or
confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine
Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is
uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in
American letters. "Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking,
and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by
"one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles
Times Book Review).
"Both Flesh and Not" gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays,
all published in book form for the first time.
Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident
than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of
writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm
toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; "Terminator 2" and "The
Best of the Prose Poem"; the nature of being a fiction writer and
the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated
novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and
much more.
"Both Flesh and Not" restores Wallace's essays as originally
written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary
list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.
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.
With a foreword by Tom Bisell. "The next step in fiction...Edgy,
accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think
Gaddis. Think." --Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic
In this exuberantly praised book-a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner-David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that animated his bestselling novel, Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In this exuberantly acclaimed collection he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
'One of the most dazzling luminaries of contemporary American
fiction' Sunday Times 'The most commanding and exciting and
inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive... [He] nailed
it like nobody else ever had' Jonathan Franzen '[He was] first
among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and
original, the funniest... This man got inside the world's mind and
changed it for the better' George Saunders 'Radical, impassioned,
heart-and brain-stretching... His talent was so obviously great it
confused people' Zadie Smith Discover one of the most celebrated
writers of our age - the visionary author of Infinite Jest andA
Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again From genre-defining
reportage to genre-breaking fiction, David Foster Wallace captured
the human experience as no-one else has - in all its multiplicity,
sorrow and tenderness, wit and irony and deep, dazzling truth.
Penguin presents the very best of his collected fiction and
nonfiction, including extracts from his most famous novels, short
stories and iconic essays such as 'Consider the Lobster'. Alongside
these classic pieces is exclusive, previously unpublished work, and
critical contributions from twelve prominent authors and thinkers,
all commissioned specifically for this collection.
The Pale King is David Foster Wallace's final novel - a testament
to his enduring brilliance The Internal Revenue Service Regional
Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutaie of
a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for.
Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of
their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the
quotidian, lies all human life. And this is David Foster Wallace's
towering, brilliant, hilarious and deeply moving final novel.
'Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac' New York
Times 'A bravura performance worthy of Woolf or Joyce. Wallace's
finest work as a novelist' Time 'Light-years beyond Infinite Jest.
Wallace's reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken
columns beloved of Romantic painters, The Pale King will stand,
complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional
achievement' Hari Kunzru, Financial Times 'A paradise of language
and intelligence' The Times 'Archly brilliant' Metro 'Teems with
erudition and ideas, with passages of stylistic audacity, with
great cheerful thrown-out gags, goofy puns and moments of truly
arresting clarity. Innovative, penetrating, forcefully intelligent
fiction like Wallace's arrives once in a generation, if that' Daily
Telegraph 'In a different dimension to the tepid vapidities that
pass as novels these days. Sentence for sentence, almost word for
word, Wallace could out-write any of his peers' Scotland on Sunday
David Foster Wallace wrote the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom
of the System, and the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair. His
non-fiction includes Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing
I'll Never Do Again, Everything and More, This is Water and Both
Flesh and Not. He died in 2008.
'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian ...He can do anything with a
piece of prose, and it is a humbling experience to see him go to
work on what has passed up till now as 'modern fiction'. He's so
modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of
us. Goddamn him' ZADIE SMITH A recognised master of form and a
brilliant recorder of human behaviour, David Foster Wallace has
been hailed as 'the most significant writer of his generation'
(TLS). Each new book confirms and extends his genius, and this new
short story collection is no exception. In the stories that make up
OBLIVION, David Foster Wallace conjoins the rawest, most naked
humanity with the infinite convolutions of self-consciousness - a
combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. 'Wallace's talent is
such that you can't help wondering: how good can he get?' TIME OUT
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour?
What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video
News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth
Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions
and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction. For this
collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring
circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of
the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from
booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and
limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles
his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to
get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring
a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good
on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration
of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our
time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.
An instant classic of American sportswriting--the tennis essays of
David Foster Wallace, "the best mind of his generation" (A. O.
Scott) and "the best tennis-writer of all time" (New York Times)
Gathered for the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, here
are David Foster Wallace's legendary writings on tennis, five
tour-de-force pieces written with a competitor's insight and a
fan's obsessive enthusiasm. Wallace brings his dazzling literary
magic to the game he loved as he celebrates the other-worldly
genius of Roger Federer; offers a wickedly witty disection of Tracy
Austin's memoir; considers the artistry of Michael Joyce, a
supremely disciplined athlete on the threshold of fame; resists the
crush of commerce at the U.S. Open; and recalls his own career as a
"near-great" junior player. Whiting Award-winning writer John
Jeremiah Sullivan provides an introduction.
In these stories, the author renders the bizarre normal and the
absurd hilarious, from the eerily real , almost holographic
evocations of historical figures, to overtelevised game-show hosts
and late-night comedians. In the title story, punk nihilism meets
Young Republicanism.
A collection of insightful and uproariously funny non-fiction by the bestselling author of INFINITE JEST - one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time. A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING… brings together Wallace's musings on a wide range of topics, from his early days as a nationally ranked tennis player to his trip on a commercial cruiseliner. In each of these essays, Wallace's observations are as keen as they are funny. Filled with hilarious details and invigorating analyses, these essays brilliantly expose the fault line in American culture - and once again reveal David Foster Wallace's extraordinary talent and gargantuan intellect.
"The Pale King" remained unfinished at the time of Wallace's death,
but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and
fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook,
grappling with questions about the value of work.
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins
the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of
self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.
These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster
Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his
son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The
Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most
hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics
surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature
sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering
Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully
polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating
the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a
complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once
preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an
arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work
challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta
Journal-Constitution).
David Foster Wallace was at the center of late-20th-century
American literature, Bryan A. Garner at that of legal scholarship
and lexicography. It was language that drew them together. The
wide-ranging interview reproduced here memorializes 67 minutes of
their second and final evening together, in February 2006. It was
DFW's last long interview, and the only one devoted exclusively to
language and writing.
Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by
"one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles
Times Book Review).
"Both Flesh and Not" gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays,
all published in book form for the first time.
Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident
than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of
writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm
toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; "Terminator 2" and "The
Best of the Prose Poem"; the nature of being a fiction writer and
the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated
novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and
much more.
"Both Flesh and Not" restores Wallace's essays as originally
written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary
list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.
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