Books like Infinite Jest
In a near-future North America where years are sold to corporate sponsors, an elite tennis academy and the halfway house down the hill orbit a film so entertaining it kills anyone who watches it.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Infinite Jest
Gravity's Rainbow
A massive, hallucinatory novel tracking a V-2 rocket across wartime Europe, connecting paranoia, entropy, Pavlovian conditioning, and the death drive of Western civilisation.
Against the Day
A sprawling historical novel spanning from the Colorado mining wars to the Tunguska explosion, where anarchists, balloonists, and time travellers chase light and vengeance across the planet.
Stand on Zanzibar
In an overpopulated 2010 of surveillance, violence and information overload, an executive and a spy are drawn into a scheme to develop an African nation and a breakthrough in genetic engineering in Southeast Asia, in Brunner's 1968 collage novel.
Underworld
A panoramic Cold War novel that begins with a lost baseball and Bobby Thomson's home run and spirals through decades of American paranoia, waste, and longing.
The Old Drift
In 1904 at the Old Drift, a settlement on the Zambezi near Victoria Falls, an Englishman's blunder sets three families, African, European and Indian, on paths that will cross over the next century in Zambia and into its near future.
A Scanner Darkly
Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent in Orange County, lives among the users of Substance D, and his own department, which knows him only by a code name, assigns him to watch himself.
Oblivion
Eight long stories about consciousness, suffering, and the impossibility of escaping one's own mind, Wallace at his most claustrophobic and technically dazzling.
The Pale King
An unfinished novel about examiners at an IRS centre in Peoria, Illinois, where the most boring job in the world becomes a spiritual discipline.
Chain-Gang All-Stars
In a near-future America, incarcerated fighters earn their freedom through televised death-matches, and two star lovers consider how long they can keep winning.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
Baron Béla Wenckheim, a gambler who has spent years in exile in Argentina, comes back to his Hungarian home town to find his first love, and the town prepares to welcome a saviour.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
A rock star and a photographer fall in love against a backdrop of earthquakes, Orphic myth, and the collision of Eastern and Western music.
Gnomon
In a near-future Britain run by the System, which watches everything, Diana Hunter, a dissident, dies under interrogation, and Inspector Mielikki Neith, going through the recordings of her mind, finds in them the stories of four other people.