Infinite Jest

De: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers

Narrado por: Sean Pratt

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.

"The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." —Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic

©2024 David Foster Wallace (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company

Wonderful in audio

I couldn’t imagine this in audio but narrator did an amazing job, with DFW long sentences and great wordplay. Narrator was smooth and really brought IJ to life in unexpected ways.
IJ one of my favorite books. This makes my 5th reading as it’s so dense & not easy to hold & read such a heavy book that you also can’t put down.
I’d put this audio version over reading it first for its clarity and excellence overall. You can follow along with the book to get into the longer footnotes and not get lost.
Amazing job. Kudos to narrator and production team.

Incredible

This version of the audio book is so impressive. Love how they handle the footnotes - it was a touch distracting at first, but you get use to it quickly and I don’t think there is a better way of doing it. The narrator really brought the characters alive. Amazing performance. I was never able to make it through the print version, so happy the audio book was so well done. It’s a life changing novel. It’s worth the effort and time.

It seems impossible that this classic work could be improved, but Sean Pratt's reading is that brilliant.

I love this book and have read it twice, but we all agree, that's an undertaking. So dense, it has eluded many. Now that this audio version is available, many more people will experience this stunning work. The book interweaves several plot lines, each in the voice of an artfully drawn, idiosyncratic character, and Sean Pratt brings them all to life. Wallace would have been more than pleased by this performance of his opus.

With footnotes!

This version of the audiobooks includes the (excellent) footnotes in line with the rest of the text. In my opinion, this is the only way to listen to this book. Extraordinary book, superlative narrator.

An outstanding exploration of, well, everything

A slight overexaggeration aside, this book is perhaps the most interesting and thought provoking piece of media I've ever been lucky enough to learn of. Movies and shows and games and other books just can't stack up anymore after finishing it. The lasting impression this has left on me is one that is deep and complex and incomprehensible at times and yet, I feel like I grasp every sentence with the ease I wish I could grasp life itself. I still don't...get it, not all the way. It's begging to be reread and retread, studied and learned and decoded, to be spoken of in ways that can only betray the story itself's grandiosity. I feel like an idiot beyond the definition of the word but I also feel like I've learned something about myself that I wouldn't have otherwise understood if I hadn't listened to this. The narration only carries it further - an absolute masterclass in tone, delivery, and gravitas. I'm not ashamed to admit I don't know if I'll ever understand what David Foster Wallace could have possibly been conveying, not to the fullest extent the author himself would. Gone too soon, yet left the world with a tome so beautiful and horrific and chaotic and orderly that opposing terms as such can be the only way to truly describe it. This should be required reading to do just about anything. Please, an urge from one lost heart to billions of others, do yourself a favor and spend the time necessary to explore this mighty work. If you give yourself over to it, you will not regret it.

The narrator, an incredible voice and an incredible array of different voices

The story was too disjointed to be an audible book, but the beauty of the language and the depth of the knowledge came through.

Wasted Space, Missed Opportunity

I say “over,” you say “rated.” Somewhere in this self-important, pretentious mess may be a tight, engaging novel but it would take hacking away at least one-third of it. To be sure, it has long sections of exceptionally well-written prose. But so much of it is so confusing and needlessly asks so much of the reader as to be pointless, if not incomprehensible. Excellent narration. Terribly overblown and overrated IMHO.

Read along with the audiobook

I'm not someone who has a degree in literature or any fine arts. I've never considered myself as someone who devours literature. I'm just your regular casual reader. I purchased a physical copy of Infinite Jest without knowing anything about the book. I was feeling confident that I was enjoying reading so much this winter that I wanted to take on a longer challenge. A friend had sent me a video of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, "This is Water," I thought this might be a good time to check out his written work.

About 130 pages or so into Infinite Jest, I hated it. I didn't get it. I had trouble parsing through all the details accompanying every scene. I stalled on words I didn't know how to pronounce or what they meant. There were too many abbreviations. I got tired of flipping to footnotes and being marginally more informed about the context. I couldn't do 800 more pages of this. It was a slog. I started looking for another book to get my reading momentum back.

I set the book aside for a day or two and thought, Maybe I should restart and try listening to the audiobook while reading. So I signed up for an Audible account and selected Infinite Jest as my book for the month, and away I went.

I've never gone from hating a book to loving it so much as I did Infinite Jest, and this would've never happened without the beautiful narration by Sean Pratt. His energy, his accents, and his tone are perfect throughout. And get this...he reads the full version of abbreviations when the reader might not have enough context to know what they stand for. The audiobook had me engaged for every single page. Turns out this book really IS funny. And it's devastating. And it's witty. And it's heartbreaking. And all the details that take up several pages in describing a scene ARE necessary. I sort of discovered that I'm not the type of person who can extract these sorts of things in a silent reading of the book. I need to be read to like a child.

Reading along with the audiobook was perfect for me. Aside from bringing color and texture to the story, the audiobook did two things for me. 1) I was able to plan ahead and schedule time for how long I was going to read and come to a reasonable stopping point. This helped slow down my reading, and I wasn't just trying to speed-run Infinite Jest just to get it over with. 2) The audiobook helped me sustain reading momentum when I reached for a glass or checked the clock or felt I needed to rub my eyes. The story kept moving in audio form. Sean Pratt's narration flows very smoothly, and the little micro-distractions that sometimes interrupt my reading were no longer relevant.

So if you're like me and have trouble unraveling the complexities of this novel, try reading along with the audiobook. I have a newfound appreciation for postmodern/metamodern literature.

Genuinely the best literary experience

Great narration, masterpiece book, and they added the footnotes! This version is basically perfect, it makes reading IJ much easier.

Good Luck...

Years ago a good friend of mine was on a beach in Mexico. a local teenage boy, likely know older than 16 or 17, approach the two of them with a basket of oysters and clams on ice and offered, for the price of $0.25 each, shucked fresh oysters. they were hungry, and so between the two of them they ate about 16. Very fresh and very delicious. my friend was there with his buddy, who had a hard copy of infinite Jest on his beach towel. As the oyster vendor picked up his basket, dripping a bit from the melting ice chunks that were keeping the remaining oysters cool and fresh, he starts to walk away from them, stops, turns and says before moving on- "Good luck with David Foster Wallace."