Author Guide · Literary Fiction & Essays
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David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), the American author of Infinite Jest, wrote three novels, three story collections and a shelf of essays, and nearly all of it circles one question: what it actually feels like to be a conscious person inside your own head, surrounded by entertainment and irony designed to help you avoid finding out. That 1996 novel made him famous and remains one of the most argued-over American novels of its century. He died in 2008, leaving The Pale King unfinished. This guide covers all thirteen books under his name, in order, and which one to open first.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 books · novels, stories & essays · 1987–2016 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
David Foster Wallace published thirteen books: the novels The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996) and the unfinished The Pale King (2011); the story collections Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004); the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), Both Flesh and Not (2012) and String Theory (2016); and Signifying Rappers (1990), Everything and More (2003) and This Is Water (2009). If Infinite Jest feels too big, start with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Where to Start with David Foster Wallace
If you want the book everyone means
→ Infinite Jest (1996).
If Infinite Jest feels too big a commitment
→ A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997).
If you want one essay in a single evening
→ This Is Water (2009).
If you want his short fiction at its best
→ Oblivion (2004).
All 13 David Foster Wallace Books, in Order
The Broom of the System
Wallace's debut novel, written largely as his undergraduate creative writing thesis at Amherst, follows Lenore Beadsman, whose grandmother has disappeared from a nursing home, in a satirical, philosophically dense Ohio populated by a talking cockatiel and a company obsessed with baby food.
Looser and more overtly comic than his later work, but the preoccupations that would define his career — language, solipsism, the difficulty of real connection — are already fully present.
— LisanneGirl with Curious Hair
His first story collection ranges widely in style and subject, including “Lyndon,” narrated by an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” a long, self-consciously postmodern response to John Barth.
Uneven but genuinely experimental — useful for seeing him testing the formal tricks (nested narration, extreme self-awareness) he'd later deploy with more control.
— LisanneSignifying Rappers
A book-length essay on rap music written with his friend Mark Costello, built from the two of them listening to and arguing about the records of the late 1980s. His first nonfiction, and the only book he co-wrote.
Infinite Jest
Set in a near-future North America where years are sold to corporate sponsors, the novel follows a tennis academy and an addiction halfway house in the same Boston suburb, orbiting a film so pleasurable it leaves viewers catatonic. 1,079 pages and 388 endnotes.
One of the most formally ambitious and most argued-over American novels of the twentieth century. Its central claim — that entertainment engineered purely for pleasure is a kind of death — has only become more relevant since 1996.
— LisanneA Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
A collection of personal essays including the title piece, an account of a Caribbean luxury cruise that becomes a meditation on manufactured pleasure and despair, alongside pieces on the Illinois State Fair and David Lynch.
The best entry point into Wallace if Infinite Jest feels like too large a commitment — the same voice, humour and self-aware digression, in essays you can finish in one sitting.
— LisanneBrief Interviews with Hideous Men
A story collection built partly around a recurring format — unseen interviewers questioning men about their relationships to women — that exposes casual cruelty and self-justification without letting the reader stay comfortably outside it.
His most formally daring story collection, and his most direct engagement with masculinity, manipulation, and the stories men tell themselves about their own decency.
— LisanneEverything and More
A history of the mathematical concept of infinity, from Zeno's paradoxes to Georg Cantor's set theory, written for general readers with Wallace's characteristic digression and enthusiasm rather than as a textbook.
An outlier in his bibliography — a genuine maths book — but it shows the same obsessive precision and love of technical difficulty that runs underneath the fiction.
— LisanneOblivion
His last story collection published in his lifetime, darker and more formally difficult than his earlier fiction, including “Good Old Neon,” widely considered one of his finest stories.
Denser and less immediately funny than his earlier collections. “Good Old Neon” in particular reads very differently in light of what came four years later.
— LisanneConsider the Lobster
A second major essay collection, including the title piece on the ethics of boiling lobsters alive at a Maine food festival, and a long, closely reported piece on talk radio and the host John Ziegler.
Generally considered his strongest essay collection — the title essay in particular is a model of taking a seemingly small subject and using it to ask a genuinely difficult moral question.
— LisanneThis Is Water
His 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, on attention, empathy and the default settings of an adult life, published as a short standalone book the year after his death. One of the most widely read things he wrote.
The Pale King
His unfinished novel about agents at an IRS processing centre in Illinois and the nature of boredom, assembled by his editor Michael Pietsch from the manuscripts and notes Wallace left behind. It was one of three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the year the board gave no fiction prize at all.
Both Flesh and Not
A third collection of essays, gathering pieces never before collected in book form, including his celebrated essay on Roger Federer.
String Theory
His five essays on tennis gathered in one volume by the Library of America — the game he played seriously as a junior, and the subject he wrote about better than anyone.
How Many Books Did David Foster Wallace Write?
Thirteen books carry his name alone or first. They fall into four groups.
- The novels — The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996) and the unfinished The Pale King (2011). Read the entries →
- The stories — Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004). Read the entries →
- The essays — A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), Both Flesh and Not (2012) and String Theory (2016). Read the entries →
- Everything else — Signifying Rappers (1990), Everything and More (2003) and This Is Water (2009), plus the editions and theses below. See the full list →
In What Order to Read David Foster Wallace
Nothing continues from one book to the next, so publication order is a choice rather than a requirement. Reading in order does show something real: the comic, show-off debut, then the long build to Infinite Jest, then fiction that grows darker while the essays get sharper.
A reading path
1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
2. Infinite Jest (1996)
3. Consider the Lobster (2005)
4. Oblivion (2004)
5. The Pale King (2011)
Everything Else David Foster Wallace Wrote: The Full List
Between 2008 and 2014 a few more books appeared under his name: a reissued campaign essay, an early thesis and an anthology.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
Also published under his name
3
3 books · 2008–2014
- 2008McCain's Promisehis 2000 Rolling Stone essay on John McCain's primary campaign, reissued as a short book
- 2010Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Willhis Amherst philosophy honours thesis, with essays on it by others
- 2014The David Foster Wallace Readera large anthology of fiction, essays and some of his teaching materials
The years · 1962–2008
Quick facts about David Foster Wallace
- Known for
- Infinite Jest (1996), 1,079 pages and 388 endnotes, and essays on cruise ships, lobsters and tennis that many readers love even more
- 1962
- Born in Ithaca, New York
- 1996
- Infinite Jest
- 1997
- MacArthur Fellowship
- 2008
- Dies in Claremont, California, aged 46
- Born
- 21 February 1962, Ithaca, New York; grew up in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois
- Education
- Amherst College (BA in English and philosophy, 1985); MFA, University of Arizona (1987)
- Taught
- Creative writing at Illinois State University, then Pomona College from 2002
- Books
- 13, from The Broom of the System (1987) to String Theory (2016): 3 novels, 3 story collections, 4 essay collections and 3 other books
- Awards
- MacArthur Fellowship (1997); Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Pale King (2012)
- Biography
- Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012) by D. T. Max
- On screen
- The End of the Tour (2015), based on David Lipsky’s account of a 1996 interview tour for Infinite Jest
The red mark is 1996: Infinite Jest. Four of his thirteen books came out after his death in 2008, the last in 2016.
How David Foster Wallace Writes: Attention as the Whole Subject
The voice is the thing people either love or cannot stand: long, self-correcting sentences, a narrator who notices himself noticing, and footnotes that argue with the main text. It can read as showing off. Read closely, it is the opposite, a voice trying very hard not to lie about how complicated a thought actually is.
The subject underneath almost everything is attention: what we choose to look at, what entertainment does to the choosing, and how lonely a person can be inside a mind that never stops commenting on itself. Infinite Jest makes that argument at novel length; This Is Water makes it in twenty minutes.
The essays are often the better way in. Sent to a cruise ship, a state fair or a lobster festival, he reports on the place and on himself reporting on it, and the comedy and the moral seriousness arrive in the same paragraph. For more collections in that spirit, see my best essays to read.
Writers have kept arguing with him since. Zadie Smith’s long essay on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, in Changing My Mind (2009), is one of the best short guides to how he worked; for the life, there is D. T. Max’s biography. When you have read him, the writers I put next to him are in Authors like David Foster Wallace.
Listen
David Foster Wallace on Bookworm, recorded at his home in 2000
Michael Silverblatt interviews Wallace for KCRW's Bookworm from his house in Illinois, in August 2000, as the last episode of a series on the writers who followed him. They talk about whether Infinite Jest is really difficult, loneliness in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and why his generation trusts awkward prose more than smooth prose; his dog Jeeves can be heard in the background. Archived by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The earlier 1996 conversation about Infinite Jest is on KCRW's site.
Frequently asked questions about David Foster Wallace's books
How many books did David Foster Wallace write?
Thirteen: three novels (The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest and the unfinished The Pale King), three story collections, four essay collections, and three other books — Signifying Rappers, written with Mark Costello; Everything and More, a history of infinity; and This Is Water, his Kenyon commencement speech.
What other books did the author of Infinite Jest write?
Besides Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote two other novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and the unfinished The Pale King (2011); the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion; and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, Both Flesh and Not and String Theory.
What are David Foster Wallace's books in order?
The Broom of the System (1987), Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Signifying Rappers (1990), Infinite Jest (1996), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Everything and More (2003), Oblivion (2004), Consider the Lobster (2005), This Is Water (2009), The Pale King (2011), Both Flesh and Not (2012) and String Theory (2016).
How many novels did David Foster Wallace write?
Three: The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996) and The Pale King (2011). The last was unfinished at his death and assembled by his editor from the manuscripts he left.
What is David Foster Wallace's most famous book?
Infinite Jest (1996), a 1,079-page novel set in a near-future North America, widely considered one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the twentieth century.
What should I read first by David Foster Wallace?
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), his first major essay collection, is the most commonly recommended starting point: it has his voice and humour in pieces you can finish in one sitting, before you commit to the length of Infinite Jest.
What is This Is Water?
The commencement speech Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005, about attention and choosing what to think about, published as a short book in 2009. It is one of the most widely shared things he wrote.
What is The Pale King about?
The Pale King is Wallace's unfinished novel, published in 2011 and set among IRS agents at a tax processing centre in Illinois. It is about boredom, attention and civic duty, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Did The Pale King win the Pulitzer Prize?
No, but nothing else did either. The Pale King, published in 2011, three years after Wallace’s death, was one of three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, alongside Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!. The board declined to give the fiction prize to any of them, the first time since 1977 that no fiction award was made. The full story is in my list of every Pulitzer fiction winner.
Who was David Foster Wallace?
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist, best known for Infinite Jest. He taught creative writing at Pomona College and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.
When and where was David Foster Wallace born?
On 21 February 1962, in Ithaca, New York. He grew up in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother taught English at Parkland College.
Is there a biography of David Foster Wallace?
Yes: Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012) by D. T. Max, written with access to his letters and the cooperation of his family. David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), the transcript of five days with him in 1996, became the film The End of the Tour.
How did David Foster Wallace die?
David Foster Wallace died by suicide on 12 September 2008, at the age of 46, after a long history of depression. He left an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was published in 2011.
Footnotes
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
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