Infinite Jest: A Novel.

WALLACE, David Foster.

Item Number: 117122

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

First edition of the author’s magnum opus. Thick octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For Monika and Craig With All Best Wishes! David Foster Wallace.” The recipients were friends of the author as well as the director of the Rare Book Room at the Strand Bookstore. With publisher’s invitation to the New York publication party laid in. Fine in a fine first state dust jacket with Vollmann misspelled on the back panel. Jacket design by Steve Snider.

In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." In a 2008 retrospective by The New York Times, Infinite Jest was described as "a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric." Time Magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.