A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Wallace's first major essay collection brings together pieces on tennis, television, the Illinois State Fair, film director David Lynch, and a week aboard a luxury cruise ship. The title essay, about the cruise, is a comic study of leisure that turns uneasy. Other essays ask how fiction should respond to a culture saturated with television and irony. Written with an eye for absurd detail and a nervous honesty, the collection is a good way into his voice and his central worries about entertainment and attention.