Most Popular Books by David Foster

Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here — with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work — essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I''ll Never Do Again," excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King, and legendary stories like "The Depressed Person." Wallace''s explorations of morality, self-consciousness, addiction, sports, love, and the many other subjects that occupied him are represented here in both fiction and nonfiction. Collected for the first time are Wallace''s first published story, "The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen In Relation to the Bad Thing" and a selection of his work as a writing instructor, including reading lists, grammar guides, and general guidelines for his students. A dozen writers and critics, including Hari Kunzru, Anne Fadiman, and Nam Le, add afterwords to favorite pieces, expanding our appreciation of the unique pleasures of Wallace''s writing. The result is an astonishing volume that shows the breadth and range of "one of America''s most daring and talented writers" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) whose work was full of humor, insight, and beauty.

In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Wallace''s stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are ''The Depressed Person,'' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman''s mental state; ''Adult World,'' which reveals a woman''s agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and ''Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,'' a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers.

The bestselling author of "Infinite Jest" takes on the 2,000 year-old quest to understand infinity. Wallace brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math''s most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.

David Foster Wallace''s last and most ambitious undertaking The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival Wallace learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate what little humanity and dignity the work still has. Imagined with the interior force and generosity that were David Foster Wallace''s unique gifts, The Pale King grapples directly with ultimate questions - life''s meaning, the value of work, the importance of connection - and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 2012 ''Overflows with Wallace''s humour, compassion and, above all, his rolling, powerful, crashingly beautiful prose.'' Sunday Times ''Anyone who has read Wallace will know the thrilling, intimate experience of following one of his giant held breaths of attention and feeling it fill your mind with thoughts that feel like your own.'' Sunday Age ''One of the saddest and most lovely books I''ve ever read . . . D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can''t breathe . . . Let''s state this clearly- You should read The Pale King.'' Esquire ''I started to think in Wallace-style sentences, and started to think that Wallace-style sentences are in fact the only sensible way of describing the world.'' Sunday Times

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. Lenorersquo;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 of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

An expanded edition featuring new interviews and an introduction by the editor, a New York Times journalist and friend of the author A unique selection of the best interviews given by David Foster Wallace, including the last he gave before his suicide in 2008. Complete with an introduction by Foster Wallace''s friend and NY Times journalist, David Streitfeld. And including a new, never-before-published interview between Streitfeld and Wallace.

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.

In this rare peak into the personal life of the author of numerous bestselling novels, gain an understanding of David Foster Wallace and how he became the man that he was. 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.

Fifteen never-before-collected essays by "one of America''s most daring and talented writers" all published in book form for the first time ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). 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. "Scarily astute . . . For Wallace devotees, these essays are required reading." — Booklist "Displays the late author''s vast intellectual curiosity. . . . showcase[s] Wallace''s ever-evolving, intimate, and often humorous relationship with language." — The New Yorker "At their best these essays remind us of Wallace''s arsenal of talents: his restless, heat-seeking reportorial eye; his ability to convey the physical or emotional truth of things with a couple of flicks of the wrist; his capacity to make leaps, from the mundane to the metaphysical, with breathtaking velocity and ardor." — New York Times "Every one of these pieces,,,hums with Wallace''s contrary energy. . . . They show a mind at work, and it was one of the best this country has seen." — Boston Sunday Globe

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.

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

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.

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"). 368 pp. 5-city author tour. Print ads. 20,000 print. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.