Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a “three-stage rocket to the future,” a work “equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life,” while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction—its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.
Stephen J. Burn Knihy
Since his first novel was published in 1985, Richard Powers has assembled a body of work whose intellectual breadth and imaginative energy bears comparison with that of any writer working today. Essays on Richard Powers pays tribute to that achievement by collecting seventeen essays--written by leading literary critics, philosophers, and a novelist--each of which offers important insights into Powers's narrative craft and the intellectual grids that underlie his work. Powers's novels are distinguished by both their multiple narrative forms and their sophisticated synthesis of diverse fields of knowledge; to attempt to adequately address this range, the contributors to this volume mix their study of Powers's narrative innovations with eclectic interdisciplinary perspectives, which range from photography and systems theory, to ecocriticism and neuroscience. The volume concludes with an essay by Powers himself, that explores his philosophy of the novel.