The Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life.

Combines the author's essays with work published in the UK. This title collects fifteen essays.

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the...

This is David Foster Wallace's first novel, reissued to coincide with his new short story collection.

*Razor-sharp cultural commentary and hilarious social observation from the bestselling author of INFINITE JEST.

In these stories, the author renders the bizarre normal and the absurd hilarious, from the eerily real, almost holographic evocations of historical figures, to overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians. In the title story, punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism.

'A book of formidable creative intelligence, and real moral purpose' OBSERVER