Thirty years after publication, "Infinite Jest" has settled into the background noise of American culture, faint but unmistakable. You notice it whenever the conversation turns to addiction, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. (Blake Cale / For The Times; photographs by Getty Images, Adobe Stock, Times Books, Chatto & Windus, Simon & Schuster and Viking) ...

This essay and interview appear in this week’s The Book Pages newsletter. For more information and book coverage, sign up for the free newsletter. Years ago, I taught English as a Second Language at a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. ‘One of life’s simplest pleasures is falling into a story and tuning the world out. But to get there, you have to stop worrying ...

It’s remarkable that a book this long and experimental still merits discussions outside of niche literary circles; as literary phenomena go, ‘Infinite Jest’ is a complete aberration The thing is – ...

Books can be difficult to teach for several reasons. They can be too stuffy, profane, archaic, mundane or pretentious. There are many students who would happily banish novels like these from their ...

Computers were ugly hulking gray or beige boxes then, taking up so much desk space. In 1996 I worked at Disney Interactive, my Windows 95 operating system skinned with an “X-Files” theme; when I ...