
Infinite Jest
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Narrated by:
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Sean Pratt
About this listen
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
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Story
Gravity and Grace is a profound and thought-provoking book by French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, first published posthumously in 1947. The work is a collection of her reflections, aphorisms, and meditations, offering a deep exploration of the human condition, the tension between materiality and spirituality, and the path toward transcendence. Weil’s reflections are deeply rooted in her experiences with suffering, her study of religion (particularly Christianity, though she drew inspiration from other traditions), and her observations of human behavior. Her insights delve into ...
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Irrational and impenetrable
- By Jonathan on 05-21-25
By: Simone Weil, and others
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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
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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.
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This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
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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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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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Sun and Steel
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Matthew Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known - and controversial - writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end, fits into none of them. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal.
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SNOOZEFEST
- By Ivan Rueda on 04-17-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
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.
Wonderful in audio
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Incredible
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It seems impossible that this classic work could be improved, but Sean Pratt's reading is that brilliant.
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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.
Read along with the audiobook
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Genuinely the best literary experience
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The footnotes are added in with the story, and yes there is a dinging sound to let you know it’s the end of the footnote, which is definitely necessary (and not jarring at all if you’re trying to pay attention) for flow.
One of my favorite reads ever and I don’t know why, just the way the world was established and brought about all of these characters who are connected to the main story in ways, some indirectly.
Very well worth the read and wait! I wish there was a sequel, but that will never happen. RIP DFW.
Difficult, yet delightful!
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Overall it is still Wallace’s Opus and an incredible and strange story. It’s hard to grasp but it’s amazing and worth the effort to dig into.
The best way to enjoy this book
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Awesome book, but long
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So good
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Good Luck...
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