Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring one of the most endearingly screwed-up families in contemporary fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to 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,...

Lenore Beadsman lives in Cleveland, not far from the Great Ohio Desert that now resides outside the city. When her grandmother goes missing, Lenore sets out across the desert to find her.

Spanning twenty years of the author's work, this collection of fifteen previously unpublished essays includes a look at the effect that television has had on the new generation of writers and a dissection of the movie "Terminator 2."

A collection of essays shares whimsical observations about such topics as the Bush-Kerry presidential race, the pain experienced by lobsters while they are being prepared for the feast, and Franz Kafka's questionable sense of humor.

Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, where terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar...

"Wittgensteins Mistress is the story of a woman who is convinced - and may ultimately convince the reader as well - that she is the only person left on earth. So appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, we follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects...

A collection of nonfiction storytelling.

From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism--this anthology brings together fifty works from all genres of creative nonfiction. --from back cover.