You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, recently published by Little

Brown.

He's the author as well of a book of stories, A Girl with Curious Hair, recently put out in paperback,

and an earlier book, soon to be out or available again, called

The Broom of the System. I don't know how exactly to talk about this book, so I'm going to be

reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely

imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.

Expand on that.

It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented

allows for a subject to be announced in a small form,

then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects,

and then it comes back in a second form containing

the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what we're being described were,

and I don't know this kind of science, but it just, I said to myself, this must be fractals.

It's...

I've heard you were an acute reader.

That's one of the things structurally that's going on.

It's actually structured like something called a Sarpinski gasket,

...