Fiction

Infinite Jest : A Novel by David Foster Wallace.

This is the sort of book you'll either love or hate. This erudite and physically imposing book, with hundreds of pages of footnoes, is not for the faint- hearted. Set in the near future, when the years are sold to advertisers, a lounge singer is president, and the Northwest United States is turned into a toxic waste dump and forcibly annexed to Canada, the plot ties together a Boston tennis academy, drug addicts, Quebec separatists, avant-garde film, and 12-step recovery programs. If you're looking for a linear plot and a tidy conclusion, stay away from this, but if you enjoy Joyce and Pynchon, check this out.

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.

This tale of a fact-checker at a New York literary magazine caught up in the fast-paced drug-fueled 80's club scene is hilarious. Besides that, how often do you find a novel written in the second person?

Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges.

Some amazing stories that will change the way you see literature.

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson. This book disappointed me, as it lacked the wacky humor of Bombardiers. It's one of those books that once you put down is hard to pick up again. This tale of engineers at a Silicon Valley startup has less valley character than Microsefs and failed to keep my attention.

I'm currently reading The Lime Twig by John Hawkes. This novel is supposedly very influential in the "postmodern" literature movement. It's an oblique story of unsavory characters involed in a racehorse scam, told with much unsettling imagery - a world of congealed grease, rotting dead things, the sound "of a hive of bees stinging to death a sparrow", the "cold endless odor of greasy gas". I wouldn't particularly recommend this book.

Ken Shirriff: shirriff@eng.sun.com This page: http://www.righto.com/books/fiction.html Copyright 1998 Ken Shirriff.

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