Nerve gas, Weapon of chemical warfare that affects the transmission of nerve impulses through the nervous system.
According to Ryan Compton's Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word Infinite Jest. 10. 11. n+1 has a neat story about where the name for Michael Pemulis, Hal's drug-dealing friend at Enfield Tennis Academy, came from.
What's it about? a no-nonsense undergraduate once inquired of the author of The Adventures of Augie March. It's about 200 pages too long, Saul Bellow replied. This anecdote came rushing back to me as I scanned the numerous obituaries and literary remembrances of David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself this fall at the age of 46. His most celebrated work was Infinite Jest and, like Augie, it was a depth charge that went off to either ecstatic or uneasy reviews.