Infinite Jest

By: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers

Narrated by: 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

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.

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.

First word of every 12th sentence or so cuts out..

The missing audio (about a word) at the beginning of every 12 line or so, is distracting and requires you to use context clues to figure out what it was.

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.

An Impressive Recording, All Things Considering — The Narrator Is Brilliant, Does Not Give One ‘The Fantods’

For first time readers/listeners, as well as those that are unfamiliar with D.F.W, do yourself a favour and read the book while you’re listening. Read a few hundred pages then listen to ten hours or so, and just keep on until you’re done with both. There is a common misconception that D.F.W is dense. He is not dense at all. He is wonderfully easy to read and understand. The predicament with Infinite Jest is its length, and for first time readers/listeners a lot will simply get missed because it’s such a significant amount of literature to digest. So read while you’re listening.

The voices Sean Pratt hear employees are well deployed and useful. There are so many characters,and each are lengthily-developed and more complex than the last. Listening to this work be performed so to speak allows one to paint stronger mental images about what is occurring, why it is occurring, and how each segment is connected to the next/last.

I am of the impression that there are two types of D.F.W. readers; those who are interested in being entertained and potentially generating some input on entertainment as well as addiction, and those who are attempting to decipher what Infinite Jest is “really all about.” I think moreover that both types are of course linked at least to a degree… This recording with Sean Pratt will help you determine just which type they are.

Moreover; being that this is as long of a work as it is, a few pointers: A) Look up words you don’t know… B) Don’t pause the recording in the middle of a footnote as you’ll get confused/lost when you un-pause… C) Abstain from reading/watching any critical analysis of this work before or while you’re reading; this will impede your ability to paint your own imagery and/or draw your own responses.

-Noah Balfour
Listened from the 1st of May, finished on June 19th — 2024; re-read the work throughout the month of May 2024

Achievement unloockef!

This work is as long as the Old Testament, and has about as much mystery surrounding it. Loosely based on "Hamlet," it's a story about a short piece of media (called a "cartridge") that is so entertaining that viewers cannot do anything else once exposed to it, causing death. This work had a long, rambling narrative that is almost impossible to decipher due to the many digressions, exhaustingly long cast of characters, and a plot that is extremely non-linear. Did I forget to mention the footnotes? This audiobook is a fantastic way to experience the work, as its narrator nails a dizzying array of accents, affects, and attitudes and the footnotes are conveniently delivered with a brief into and bell sound when concluded. The only criticism I have of this work is that it is so dense that it *will* escape your comprehension. Since it's author knows how to write in a more common, accessible style, as witnessed by his nonfiction work, one can only assume the inaccessibility is a feature, not a bug.

I misjudged this book back in the day

I remember everyone who thought themselves cool had this book on their shelves in the late 90s. They would condescendingly tell teenage me I “probably wouldn’t get it”.
Then as the years went by and it attained “lit bro” status I avoided it even more.
I finally decided to give it a shot as part of a book club I’m in. I’m so very glad I did. I had no idea how funny, deep, poignant, and relevant it would be. Maybe I would not have “got it “ back when I hadn’t lived through some of the harder parts of life. For whatever reason this spoke to me on a profound level.

Once again the books that make me feel this way are usually written by people who de-map themselves.

Read it. If it isn’t right for you then try again in a few years.

Also, the narration was some of the best I’ve ever heard. So good that I emailed the narrator, Sean Pratt, to tell him so. I have never done this before. It’s that good.

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.