David Foster Wallace, Everything and More

It’s not like we sit around holding our breath waiting for whatever’s next from the desk of David Foster Wallace, but we do take notice. In a way, we’re gratified that it appears to be dense work of nonfiction dedicated to hard science—that way we won’t feel guilty about keeping our nose to the grindstone with Infinite Jest, his 1997 masterpiece that we still haven’t finished (but we’re loving every sentence of it). It was probably inevitable that Wallace waded into the incredibly complicated world of higher mathematics—a kind of precise language about intellectual abstractions that has always been his argot. Here he explores the whole idea of mathematical infinities, relying on a competent interpretation of Georg Cantor’s groundbreaking theories (or so our mathematically inclined friends tell us) and, yes, reams of playful footnotes.