Infinite Jest （David Foster Wallace）

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
 
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. 
 
David Foster Wallace (1962-2011) earned bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College, where he wrote his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior thesis. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, along with story collections like Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. He received the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award. Wallace died in 2008, and his last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.