structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility. The book mimes, in its movements as well as in its dense loads of referential data, the distributed systems that are the new paradigm in communications. The book is not about electronic culture, but it has internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst. The plot is webbed, branched, rife with linkages. ... [IJ works] as a postmodern saga of damnation and salvation. The novel is confusing, yes, and maddening in myriad ways. It is also resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique. Those who stay with it will find the whole world lit up as though by black light.

Michiko Kakutani (New York Times, February 13, 1996) wrote that Wallace was

a2004 Red Sox DVDs -- the absolute starting point for anyone curious about DFW is his non-fiction essays.

Grab "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" -- a lot of which was written at the same time as IJ and serves, in my opinion, as kind of addendum to the novel in terms of Wallace's working out more of his thoughts on the same subjects.

His other collection is "Consider The Lobster" (title piece here or here).

Online: DFW's commencement address in May 2005 to the graduating class at Kenyon College, "Roger Federer As Religious Experience", from August 2006, and the first of his writings (not counting that aborted first try at IJ) I ever read -- a report from the 1995 U.S. Open. It's an obvious precursor to his