
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays and Arguments
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Narrated by:
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Paul Garcia
About this listen
In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
©1997 David Foster Wallace (P)2012 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
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Performance
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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.
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How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
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The Pale King
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- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
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Story
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.
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The King is dead, long live the King!
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David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
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This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 24 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. 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.
-
-
The best 20 minutes of my life.
- By John Nosal on 10-09-12
-
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
-
-
This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
-
Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
-
Consider the Lobster
- And Other Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
-
The Pale King
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 King is dead, long live the King!
- By Darwin8u on 10-31-16
-
David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
-
This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 24 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. 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.
-
-
The best 20 minutes of my life.
- By John Nosal on 10-09-12
-
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
-
-
This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
-
Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
-
The David Foster Wallace Reader
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace, Sally Foster Wallace, and others
- Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Impossible to use without Chapter Names
- By Ethan Klitzke on 12-04-21
-
The Broom of the System
- A Novel
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
-
On Tennis
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- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. 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.
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Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform
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Flowers for Algernon
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Charlie Gordon knows that he isn't very bright. At 32, he mops floors in a bakery and earns just enough to get by. Three evenings a week, he studies at a center for mentally challenged adults. But all of this is about to change for Charlie. As part of a daring experiment, doctors are going to perform surgery on Charlie's brain. They hope the operation and special medication will increase his intelligence, just as it has for the laboratory mouse, Algernon.
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Walk with a Swagger
- By Tim on 05-30-14
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Both Flesh and Not
- Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not", considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2", which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and more.
-
-
Both Perfect and Not
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Signifying Rappers
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Finally back in print - David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. 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.
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Signifying Roomates
- By Darwin8u on 08-08-13
By: Mark Costello, and others
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The Mechanic
- John Tyler Action Thrillers Series, Book 1
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- Unabridged
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John Tyler finally built the life he wanted. But his past casts a long shadow. Eight years retired from the army, Tyler manages his PTSD and begins a job as a classic car mechanic. He's a single dad to Lexi, who's about to enter college. Life is looking up. Then, everything comes crashing down. Tyler's former commanding officer is out of prison and hellbent on revenge. Their mutual hatred has been simmering for years. When it finally boils over, everyone and everything in Tyler's life is threatened.
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See spot run
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East of Eden
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Performance
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Story
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
- By Kelly on 03-25-17
By: John Steinbeck
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Girl with Curious Hair
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.
-
-
This book is not NOT a Datsun!
- By Darwin8u on 04-15-12
-
Everything and More
- A Compact History of Infinity
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Equations via audio are tuff
- By Brian E. on 03-08-22
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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- Narrated by: James Franco
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
- By Keith on 11-20-15
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
- A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
- By: David Lipsky
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
-
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Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
- By Darwin8u on 08-27-12
By: David Lipsky
Critic reviews
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Consider the Lobster
- And Other Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
-
The David Foster Wallace Reader
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace, Sally Foster Wallace, and others
- Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Impossible to use without Chapter Names
- By Ethan Klitzke on 12-04-21
-
Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
-
The Pale King
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 King is dead, long live the King!
- By Darwin8u on 10-31-16
-
David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
-
The Broom of the System
- A Novel
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
-
Consider the Lobster
- And Other Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
-
The David Foster Wallace Reader
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace, Sally Foster Wallace, and others
- Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Impossible to use without Chapter Names
- By Ethan Klitzke on 12-04-21
-
Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
-
The Pale King
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 King is dead, long live the King!
- By Darwin8u on 10-31-16
-
David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
-
The Broom of the System
- A Novel
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
-
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
-
-
This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
-
Both Flesh and Not
- Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not", considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2", which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and more.
-
-
Both Perfect and Not
- By Darwin8u on 02-16-13
-
Infinite Jest
- By: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 64 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
With footnotes!
- By George Saris on 04-25-24
By: David Foster Wallace, and others
-
Everything and More
- A Compact History of Infinity
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Equations via audio are tuff
- By Brian E. on 03-08-22
-
Girl with Curious Hair
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.
-
-
This book is not NOT a Datsun!
- By Darwin8u on 04-15-12
-
On Tennis
- Five Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. 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.
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Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform
- By Darwin8u on 01-27-17
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This Is Water
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Amy Wallace-Havens
- Length: 23 mins
- Unabridged
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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? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his 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.
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Too short for what you pay for!
- By Adryan on 05-14-09
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This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 24 mins
- Original Recording
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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. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. 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.
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The best 20 minutes of my life.
- By John Nosal on 10-09-12
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
- A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
- By: David Lipsky
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
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Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
- By Darwin8u on 08-27-12
By: David Lipsky
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Consider the Lobster (A Story from Consider the Lobster)
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
- Length: 3 hrs and 48 mins
- Abridged
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Long renowned as one of the smartest writers on the loose, David Foster Wallace reveals himself in Consider the Lobster to be also one of the funniest. In this program, he ranges far and farther in his search for the original, the curious, or the merely mystifying. He discovers the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the Maine Lobster Festival and confronts the inevitable question just beyond the butter-or-cocktail-sauce quandary.
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David Foster Wallace...a good place to start
- By Rick on 11-25-08
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The Unlikely Thru-Hiker
- An Appalachian Trail Journey
- By: Derick Lugo
- Narrated by: Derick Lugo
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Derick Lugo had never been hiking. He certainly couldn't imagine going more than a day without manicuring his goatee. But with a job cut short and no immediate plans, this fixture of the New York comedy scene began to think about what he might do with months of free time. He had heard of the Appalachian Trail, but he had never seriously considered attempting to hike all 2,184.2 miles of it. Suddenly he found himself asking, Could he do it?
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On My Feet All Day
- By bannedbum on 08-21-21
By: Derick Lugo
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Unlost
- A Journey of Self-Discovery and the Healing Power of the Wild Outdoors
- By: Gail Muller
- Narrated by: Gail Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Gail Muller was told she’d be in a wheelchair by the age of 40. At 41, she set out to hike one of the world’s toughest treks: the Appalachian Trail - a 2,200-mile journey that would help her reclaim her life and heal her mind and body. An inspiring, moving, and uplifting memoir for fans of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.
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Excellent!
- By Heather H. on 10-14-21
By: Gail Muller
The title reflects expectations
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Brilliant writer/pitch perfect narration
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Terrible Reader
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Good essays.
Yes. Good listen.
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Life Through David Foster Wallace's Eyes
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brilliant but dated material
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Would you listen to A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again again? Why?
Yes. I would like to experience a few of the essay's topics then listen to these essays again.What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The author's attention to details. He has a way of writing a mundane occurrence in a way that makes you feel like you too should be getting more out of how you view life.Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I really appreciated a theme mentioned in at two of the essays of how millions of people are being sold the concept of individualism.A Collection of Clever Observations
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Great variety
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Started 2020 Right
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Great Book
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