books in order

David Foster Wallace Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Broom of the System (1987)
  2. Infinite Jest (1996)
  3. The Pale King (2011)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Girl With Curious Hair (1989)
  2. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
  3. Oblivion (2004)
  4. The David Foster Wallace Reader (2014)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Signifying Rappers (1990)
  2. The Future of Fiction (1996)
  3. Review of Contemporary Fiction (1996)
  4. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
  5. McCain’s Promise (2000)
  6. Up, Simba! (2000)
  7. Everything and More (2003)
  8. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005)
  9. This Is Water (2009)
  10. Fate, Time, and Language (2010)
  11. Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All (2012)
  12. Both Flesh and Not (2012)
  13. Quack This Way (2013)
  14. On Tennis (2014)
  15. David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words (2014)

Great Discoveries Books In Publication Order

  1. Lavoisier in the Year One (By:Madison Smartt Bell) (2005)
  2. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (By:) (2005)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Best American Essays 2005 (2005)
  2. The Best American Essays 2007 (2007)
  3. Boston Noir 2 (2012)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Great Discoveries Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

David Foster Wallace Books Overview

The Broom of the System

The ‘dazzling, exhilarating’ San Francisco Chronicle debut novel from the bestselling author of Infinite Jest, available for the first time as an audiobook. At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching and also bewildered hero*ine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great grandmother, a one time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau and boss, editor in chief Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous. And her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psychobabble, Auden, and the King James Bible, which may propel him to stardom on a Christian fundamentalist television program. Fiercely intelligent and entertaining, this debut novel from one of the most innovative writers of our generation explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

Infinite Jest

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 Pale King

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough 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 training, he 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 even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace’s death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions questions of life’s meaning and of the value of work and society through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace’s unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

Girl With Curious Hair

In these stories, the author renders the bizarre normal and the absurd hilarious, from the eerily real , almost holographic evocations of historical figures, to overtelevised game show hosts and late night comedians. In the title story, punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

In his startling and singular new short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. 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 agonised consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men‘, a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque. Wallace’s stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many different guises. Thought provoking and playful, this collection confirms David Foster Wallace as one of the most imaginative young writers around. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the ironic, the surprising and the illuminating from every situation. His new collection will delight his growing number of fans, and provide a perfect introduction for new readers.

Oblivion

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.

Signifying Rappers

The author of Infinite Jest and his co writer discuss rap and popular culture, power, money, racial politics, and language in the first book to seriously consider rap and its position as a vital force in American culture. ‘Brilliantly written…
with great wit, insight, and in your face energy.’ Review of Contemporary Fiction.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

A collection of insightful and uproariously funny non fiction by the bestselling author of INFINITE JEST one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time. A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING…
brings together Wallace’s musings on a wide range of topics, from his early days as a nationally ranked tennis player to his trip on a commercial cruiseliner. In each of these essays, Wallace’s observations are as keen as they are funny. Filled with hilarious details and invigorating analyses, these essays brilliantly expose the fault line in American culture and once again reveal David Foster Wallace’s extraordinary talent and gargantuan intellect.

McCain’s Promise

Is John McCain ‘For Real?’That’s the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain’s campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was ‘to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self interest.’ And many young Americans were beginning to take notice. To get at ‘something riveting and unspinnable and true’ about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough and tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man.

Everything and More

The best selling author of Infinite Jest on the two thousand year old quest to understand infinity. One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math’s most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity. Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth century mathematical genius Georg Cantor’s answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor’s counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology. Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace’s tour de force brings immediate and high profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics. About the series: W. W. Norton and Atlas Books announce the launch of an exciting new series Great Discoveries bringing together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humor? What is John Updike’s deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious nonfiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind the scenes view of a conservative talk show featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that looks good only on the radio.

This Is Water

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.

Fate, Time, and Language

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor’s method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument. Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace’s brilliant critique of Taylor’s work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace’s thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism that abandoned ‘the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.’ As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson’s introduction connects Wallace’s early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. 10/11/10

Lavoisier in the Year One (By:Madison Smartt Bell)

ANTOINE LAVOISIER who lived at the zenith of the Enlightenment and died at the hands of the Revolution was himself a revolutionary. Closely followed by the burgeoning international scientific community, he competed with the best minds of his time of be the first to explain how chemical processes really work. Aided by a large fortune and his accomplished wife, he employed the most ingenious and expensive technology of his time in a series of innovative experiments that forever buried medieval alchemy and established a chemical language still in use today. Yet his personal triumph was short lived, and the glory his achievement brought France could not protect him from the ravages of the Terror. Madison Smartt Bell, building on his celebrated trilogy about the eighteenth century Haitian uprisings, dramatically re creates this turbulent era of reason and revolution, and the works of a man who so thoroughly exemplified its spirit.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (By:)

A masterly introduction to the life and thought of the man who transformed our conception of math forever. Kurt G del is considered the greatest logician since Aristotle. His monumental theorem of incompleteness demonstrated that in every formal system of arithmetic there are true statements that nevertheless cannot be proved. The result was an upheaval that spread far beyond mathematics, challenging conceptions of the nature of the mind. Rebecca Goldstein, a MacArthur winning novelist and philosopher, explains the philosophical vision that inspired G del’s mathematics, and reveals the ironic twist that led to radical misinterpretations of his theorems by the trendier intellectual fashions of the day, from positivism to postmodernism. Ironically, both he and his close friend Einstein felt themselves intellectual exiles, even as their work was cited as among the most important in twentieth century thought. For G del , the sense of isolation would have tragic consequences. This lucid and accessible study makes G del’s theorem and its mindbending implications comprehensible to the general reader, while bringing this eccentric, tortured genius and his world to life. About the series:Great Discoveries brings together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.

The Best American Essays 2005

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. The Best American Essays 2005 includesRoger Angell Andrea Barrett Jonathan Franzen Ian Frazier Edward Hoagland Ted Kooser Jonathan Lethem Danielle Ofri Oliver Sacks Cathleen Schine David Sedaris Robert Stone David Foster Wallace and othersSusan Orlean, guest editor, is the author of My Kind of Place, The Orchid Thief, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1982, she has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.

The Best American Essays 2007

The twenty two essays in this powerful collection perhaps the most diverse in the entire series come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative in first and third person opinion, memoir, argument, the essay review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little known but remarkable eighteenth century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community. In his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first rate artistic mind can make of particular fact sets whether these involve the 17 kHz ring tones of some kids cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you ve believed and revered turns out to be self indulgent crap.

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