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Books : Search |
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Infinite Jest»rank: 299by: David Foster Wallace
: :In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novelThe Broom of the System.Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves. Review:In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel The Broom of the System. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements ... |
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments»rank: 974by: David Foster Wallace
: :This exuberantly praised--and uproariously funny--first collection of nonfiction pieces by one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time--the author of 'Infinite Jest'--'reconfirms Mr. Wallace's stature as one of his generation's preeminent talents' ('New York Times') 5-city author tour. Print ads . Review:David Foster Wallace made quite a splash in 1996 with his massive novel, Infinite Jest. Now he's back with a collection of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In addition to a razor-sharp writing style, Wallace has a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects. His seven essays travel from a state fair in Illinois to a cruise ship in the ... |
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Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays»rank: 979by: David Foster Wallace
: :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 a vicious 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. |
The Broom of the System»rank: 9704by: David Foster Wallace
: :Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho- babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers ... |
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men»rank: 7996by: David Foster Wallace
: :An exuberantly acclaimed collection -- twenty-two stories that combine hilarity and an escalating disquiet as they expand our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford. Review:Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out by the many readers who ... |
Girl With Curious Hair»rank: 10079by: David Foster Wallace
: :This collection could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmoderism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine. A compelling presence of a holograph and the up-to-the-second feeling of the most advanced art. |
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The Best American Essays 2007 (Edition 001)»rank: 7725from: Houghton Mifflin
: :The twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard ... |
Oblivion: Stories»rank: 11921by: David Foster Wallace
: :'Stunning......Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned how to read in the first place.' -San Francisco Chronicle OBLIVION is an arresting, hilarious new creation from a writer universally regarded as one of the most prodigious and original talents in contemporary letters. In the stories that make up this exuberantly praised collection, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. |
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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries)»rank: 29572by: David Foster Wallace
: :DAVID FOSTER WALLACE brings his intellectual ambition and bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there is more than one kind of infinity. Review:Before discussing the merits of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, it is essential to define what the book is not. This volume in the 'Great Discoveries' series is not a history of the personalities and social conditions that led to the 'discovery' of infinity. Nor is it a narrative fixated on the cultish fear of--and obsession with--the infinite that ... |
McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope»rank: 204806by: David Foster Wallace
: :Is John McCain 'For Real?' That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was 'to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest.' And many young Americans were beginning to take notice. To get at 'something riveting and unspinnable and true' about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the ... |