David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)
“The series comes as near to squaring various circles – popular / academic, ‘good read’ / ‘classic Lit’, novel / film of the book as any I know. And at best it goes a fair way towards reshuffling those categories and redrawing the boundaries. With the first volume, I was relieved. After two or three, I was hooked.The books are invaluable for gathering out-of-the-way or ephemeral comment from TV and radio interviews and the web as well as from literary reviews.Refreshingly upfront and up-to-date…Given the space, there are remarkably balanced film/novel comparisons of the most well-known examples…An important feature is the fully referenced bibliographies, including reviews and copious website addresses – the latter ranging from fanzines and authors’ and publishers’ own sites to academic discussion lists and online journals.In method as in subject matter, these guides move freely on the interface between print culture and multimedia. Highly finished and pleasantly handleable as books in their own right, they gesture accommodatingly to both words and worlds beyond.Taking the series as a whole, it also confirms two things: that narrative nowadays is generically highly hybrid and increasingly cross-media; and that an understanding of the processes of writing and reading ‘contemporary classic’ (or at least ‘currently famous’) fiction cannot be separated – yet must be distinguished – from the processes of making and marketing books and films.”- Professor Rob Pope, The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 31, 2002"Burn does a terrific job of placing "Infinite Jest" in the tradition of the encyclopedic novel, explaining the novel's chronology, and demonstrating the subtle points of intersection and narrative intertwining among the many plots. It is in making the case for the novel's careful structure that this study is most valuable…(Burn's David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest": A Reader's Guide) offers more than its size promises." —Robert L. McLaughlin in Review of Contemporary Fiction (Robert L. McLaughlin)“Burn does a terrific job of placing Infinite Jest in the tradition of the encyclopedic novel, explaining the novel’s chronology, and demonstrating the subtle points of intersection and narrative intertwining among the many plots.” –Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2004"Burn does a terrific job of placing "Infinite Jest" in the tradition of the encyclopedic novel, explaining the novel's chronology, and demonstrating the subtle points of intersection and narrative intertwining among the many plots. It is in making the case for the novel's careful structure that this study is most valuable…(Burn's David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest": A Reader's Guide) offers more than its size promises." —Robert L. McLaughlin in Review of Contemporary Fiction (Sanford Lakoff)