David Foster Wallace
All Books By David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Paul Garcia
- Length: 17 hours 46 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 07, 2012
- Language: English
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4.23(32762 ratings)
Both Flesh and Not
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 06, 2012
- Language: English
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3.86(4792 ratings)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: John Krasinski
- Length: 4 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 08, 2009
- Language: English
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3.85(21301 ratings)
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.
Consider the Lobster (A Story from Consider the Lobster)
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 15 hours 9 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 12, 2017
- Language: English
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4.16(100 ratings)
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.
David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 20, 2014
- Language: English
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4.14(362 ratings)
“[DFW’s] delivery is dead-on and fresh, the words often springing from his mouth as if conceived on the spot . . . . an audible confirmation that modern American writing continues to gain strength.” — Publishers Weekly on Consider the Lobster
Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances — from studio recordings to live performances — that are finally compiled in this unique collection. Some of the pieces collected here are: “Another Pioneer,” recorded at The University of Arizona Poetry Center; stories from Breif Interviews with Hiddeous Men and Consider the Lobster recorded in the studio; and the unforgettable “This Is Water,” his 2005 commencement address given at Kenyon College. Also included are two interviews and a 2005 conversation with Rick Moody at Herbst Theater in San Francisco.
This collection has a special introduction written and read by acclaimed writer and editor John Jeremiah Sullivan. For fans of David Foster Wallace who have read everything he ever wrote as well as those looking to familiarize themselves with his work, David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words is a special, unique collection unavailable anywhere else.
... Read moreEverything and More
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 12 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
“A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite.” —New York Times
Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace takes us from Aristotle to Newton, Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and finally Georg Cantor and his set theory. Through it all, Wallace proves to be an ideal guide—funny, wry, and unfailingly enthusiastic. Featuring an introduction by Neal Stephenson, this edition is a perfect introduction to the beauty of mathematics and the undeniable strangeness of the infinite.
*Includes a downloadable PDF with images from the text
... Read moreInfinite Jest
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Sean Pratt
- Length: 56 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: March 27, 2012
- Language: English
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4.26(69003 ratings)
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
Infinite Jest Part III: The Endnotes
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: August 14, 2012
- Language: English
These are the endnotes to David Foster Wallace’s 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.
... Read moreInfinite Jest: Part I With a Foreword by Dave Eggers
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Sean Pratt
- Length: 28 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 12, 2012
- Language: English
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4.26(5 ratings)
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.
... Read more
Infinite Jest: Part II
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Sean Pratt
- Length: 28 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 12, 2012
- Language: English
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4.26(1 ratings)
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.
... Read more
Oblivion
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hours 16 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: August 07, 2012
- Language: English
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4.07(12092 ratings)
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.
On Tennis
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 24, 2014
- Language: English
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4.17(3375 ratings)
A “long-time rabid fan of tennis,” and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace’s five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time.
This lively and entertaining collection begins with Wallace’s own experience as a prodigious tennis player (“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”). He also challenges the sports memoir genre (“How Tracy Austen Broke My Heart”), takes us to the US Open (“Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open”), and profiles of two of the world’s greatest tennis players (“Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” and “Federer Both Flesh and Not”).
With infectious enthusiasm and enormous heart, Wallace’s writing shows us the beauty, complexity, and brilliance of the game he loved best.
Signifying Rappers
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: July 23, 2013
- Language: English
Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared “an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop.”
The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan’s challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised?
Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.
The Broom of the System
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 16 hours 28 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 01, 2010
- Language: English
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3.84(17189 ratings)
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) heroine, 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.
... Read moreThe David Foster Wallace Reader
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 48 hours 44 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 11, 2014
- Language: English
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4.4(703 ratings)
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.
The Pale King
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 19 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 15, 2011
- Language: English
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3.97(15075 ratings)
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.
“The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing.” –Laura Miller, Salon
This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: Amy Wallace
- Length: 24 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 24, 2019
- Language: English
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4.5(143 ratings)
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 listening.
This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrator: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 24 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 01, 2010
- Language: English
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4.49(30132 ratings)
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.
... Read more