![]() Infinite Jest has gained a notorious reputation as the most unread bestseller of recent years. ![]() Wallace and Mitchard were identically anointed as the authors people were talking about and reading about, if not necessarily reading. But the media no longer make these distinctions. There was a time not too long ago when a book like Infinite Jest would have been tastefully marketed as serious literary fiction or perhaps an eccentric cult book, and The Deep End of the Ocean as a minor women’s suspense novel. ![]() Infinite Jest was published in 1996, the same year as Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean, the novel that became the inaugural selection of Oprah Winfrey’s outrageously successful talk-show book club. What are we to make of the curious literary career of David Foster Wallace? The success of his 1,079-page doorstop of a novel, Infinite Jest, has been variously ascribed to the marketing muscle of its publisher (Little, Brown and Company) and a rapacious mainstream media waking up to the realization that literature has acquired the same blockbuster potential as Hollywood movies and the O.J. Handmade in Japan.Ī limited production noren for the serious noren enthusiast ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |