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Infinite Jest
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 56 hrs and 12 mins
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David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
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Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
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Great listening
- By Phoebe Millwood on 21-07-2020
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Consider the Lobster
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 3 hrs and 48 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Long renowned as one of the smartest writers on the loose, David Foster Wallace reveals himself in Consider the Lobster to be also one of the funniest. In this program, he ranges far and farther in his search for the original, the curious, or the merely mystifying. He discovers the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the Maine Lobster Festival and confronts the inevitable question just beyond the butter-or-cocktail-sauce quandary.
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Thought provoking
- By Anthony Pyle on 09-08-2016
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
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good but not the whole thing.
- By Anonymous User on 18-09-2023
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Sprawling work engulfs pleasurably
- By Stan on 01-10-2016
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The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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Masterpiece given life
- By Hussain on 25-04-2022
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
-
David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
-
-
Great listening
- By Phoebe Millwood on 21-07-2020
-
Consider the Lobster
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 3 hrs and 48 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Long renowned as one of the smartest writers on the loose, David Foster Wallace reveals himself in Consider the Lobster to be also one of the funniest. In this program, he ranges far and farther in his search for the original, the curious, or the merely mystifying. He discovers the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the Maine Lobster Festival and confronts the inevitable question just beyond the butter-or-cocktail-sauce quandary.
-
-
Thought provoking
- By Anthony Pyle on 09-08-2016
-
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
-
-
good but not the whole thing.
- By Anonymous User on 18-09-2023
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
Sprawling work engulfs pleasurably
- By Stan on 01-10-2016
-
The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
-
-
Masterpiece given life
- By Hussain on 25-04-2022
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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This Is Water
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Amy Wallace-Havens
- Length: 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his 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.
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Poor Things
- By: Alasdair Gray
- Narrated by: Russ Bain, Kathryn Drysdale
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat. But his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his creation... But what does Bella think?
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Interesting
- By Kindle Customer on 09-03-2024
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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Oh for Armando Duran...
- By Kim on 06-09-2018
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Ulysses
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Jim Norton
- Length: 27 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.
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Groan
- By Travis on 03-11-2017
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Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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The New York Trilogy
- By: Paul Auster
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.
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A masterpiece!
- By JW Sydney on 06-08-2022
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Slaughterhouse-Five
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: James Franco
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Excellent detail and black humour
- By Cyndi on 19-05-2016
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Finnegans Wake
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Barry McGovern, Marcella Riordan
- Length: 29 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.
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Challenging but worthwhile
- By Amazon Customer on 18-04-2022
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Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
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Hypnotic
- By C.J.R Flanagan on 03-02-2014
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A Spectre, Haunting
- By: China Miéville
- Narrated by: China Miéville
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world—the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious. This is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today.
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Dubliners
- Penguin Classics
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Andrew Scott
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Joyce's first major work, written when he was only 25, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.
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Unimpressed
- By Happy sleeper on 17-06-2023
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Against the Day
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 53 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
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For Pynchon fans only
- By Anonymous User on 30-10-2023
Editorial reviews
Publisher's Summary
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.
Please note: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material, including endnotes, will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
A Note from Hachette Audio
We are deeply honored to be the audio publisher of David Foster Wallace's works, and are keenly aware of the great responsibility that attends the privilege. We felt that it was important to make Infinite Jest accessible in the audio format as soon as we were able, and are gratified to find that there is an audience that has been waiting for just this occasion.
Some early listeners have been disappointed that the novel's endnotes are currently available only in text form, to be read. Choosing to include the endnotes as a downloadable PDF file, rather than as a recording by the narrator, was a difficult decision for all involved, and we debated different options at length before beginning production. The audio format allows us great opportunities to showcase Wallace's love of language and grammatical dexterity, to illuminate characters and their relationships, and to bring out some of the unique humor inherent in his work. However, there are also certain limitations to the format, and we needed let go of some of our preconceived notions about the form of Infinite Jest, as we must when we adapt any complex work to audio.
The compromise we ended up with was heavily influenced by practical concerns, especially those regarding the limitations of current technology. Because some of the endnotes are pages-long digressions, if we had them read in line with the main narrative, we would have run the risk of making the already complex story unfollowable for listeners. In the end, we decided the audiobook would flow best by having the endnotes indicated by number throughout the narrative by an additional narrator. However, we acknowledge that these choices may not work for all listeners. Accordingly, our future plans are to produce the endnotes as an additional, stand-alone audio piece.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
Critic Reviews
“[A]n exhilarating, breathtaking experience. This 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.” (Newsday)
"[A] postmodern saga of damnation and salvation…resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique.” (The Atlantic Monthly)
"[C]ompulsively entertaining… one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic skills who can seemingly do anything.” (New York Times)
What listeners say about Infinite Jest
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-03-2019
Didn’t grab me
Pretentious is on the tip of my tongue- but actually I’m sure it’s totally sincere- I just can’t relate. I gave it an hour- it’s just outside my sphere. Even though I wanted to get involved- lots of people I think very highly of think this book is inspired- but it’s either too hard or too far away for me. I’m exchanging it.
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- Nicholas Windmiller
- 30-05-2018
Wow
Wow don't know how I'm suppose to feel after that but I liked it. Good narrator as well.
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- tom
- 23-08-2017
infinite trip
a gargantuan piece of american literary prose, at times it takes you with it to places you would never expect at others it will totally leave you behind. the language is thorough, beautiful, descriptive and at times totally erratic. There are moments so well represented that you feel yourself drawn into the story. it's deeply sad, deeply troubling and in the end i found myself thinking, what exactly did i just listen to, what was that.
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- Scott Sharpe
- 19-01-2023
Beautifully written and really beautifully read
This is such a antidote to the sound bite era in which we find ourselves. And Sean Pratt does Wallace’s story justice with a beautiful narration! So worth the 56 odd hours of my time!
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- jdk
- 17-05-2022
Brilliant
What can I say following so very many words? Infinite Jest is sometimes hilarious, at other times tragic, and wise novel about addiction and nearly everything else in a near future world not unlike our own. Even better the second time round.
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- kieran martin
- 04-05-2022
It’s kind of a universe
I revisit this all the time, just to spend some time around the characters. It’s a long rambling combination of parts and the sad thing about that is some short passages on depression, addiction or isolation stand alone and not everyone will get to take them in, due to the overall size of the thing
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- Kindle Customer
- 29-05-2020
wow
one of life's great reading experiences. an amazing artist is Mr Foster Wallace. read this book.
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- Mathew Hobbs
- 07-05-2019
A work of art.
contrasting carefully crafted delicious prose with pithy comedy. I am grateful to have heard it. about about to restart it all over again.
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- Anonymous User
- 25-10-2017
Genius who needed a better editor
Great book in a circuitous, fractured, imperfect, frustrating way. Might read it again. well see.
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- Bernd
- 15-06-2017
mixed bag
be prepared for massive amount of details.
started to enjoy it halfway through.
disappointed by the end.
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