30 Years On, Infinite Jest Offers a Map to an Increasingly Chaotic World

Infinite Jest is probably a novel that more people have heard of than have actually read. The 1,000 page-plus opus – that oscillates between a tennis academy, a halfway house, and the hunt for a lethally entertaining videotape, all with a dizzying number of footnotes for good measure – has, in the three decades since it was first published, become something of a meme; a shorthand for the kind of book that everybody talks about and that nobody has read. Ithellip;

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