Is there an audiobook of Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays?

Yes. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by David Foster Wallace and Robert Petkoff.

What formats is Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays available in?

On Amazon, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

Our review

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

Name: Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Author: David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

4.5/ 5 · Outstanding

David Foster Wallace turns a Maine food festival, a porn-industry awards show, and a war over dictionaries into dazzling, branching essays about how to think, how to live, and how to actually pay attention. The premise is always a doorway, never the destination.

Narrated by David Foster Wallace and Robert Petkoff

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The Review

Our take

Consider the Lobster collects David Foster Wallace's magazine journalism from his peak years, and it's the rare anthology where the assignments matter far less than the mind working through them. Sent to cover a Maine lobster festival, Wallace ends up interrogating whether it is ethical to boil a creature alive for a tourist's dinner. Dispatched to a pornography-industry awards show, he produces something closer to a meditation on American loneliness and shame. The ostensible premise is always a doorway; the real subject lies somewhere past it.

What you are really buying, page to page, is the texture of Wallace's attention. He notices everything, then notices himself noticing, and the famous footnotes branch off into qualifications and counterarguments and second thoughts until each essay becomes a kind of live transcript of a hyperactive, scrupulous conscience. It's exhilarating when it works, which is most of the time, and the title essay alone is a small masterpiece of taking a topic that should be trivial and worrying it into a genuine moral puzzle that follows you out of the room.

The range across the collection is a large part of the pleasure. A loving, exacting, very long piece on English usage and the quiet politics of grammar sits beside reportage on a conservative talk-radio host and an ambivalent, searching appreciation of Dostoevsky. Wallace is funny, often very funny, but the comedy is nearly always in the service of an almost painful sincerity, a wish to be honest about difficult things in a culture that mostly rewards a protective irony.

A fair caveat: the prose can be genuinely demanding, and the footnote architecture is not for everyone. A reader who wants brisk, linear, conventionally shaped essays may find the digressions exhausting rather than electric, and the longest pieces test patience by design. But for those willing to follow him down the branching paths and trust that he knows where they lead, this is one of the great essay collections of its era, the work of a writer who treated paying attention as itself a moral act, and who could make you feel the stakes of it.

Why you should read

Readers who love maximalist, digressive essays
Fans of literary journalism with a moral streak
Anyone curious about Wallace beyond his fiction

What to expect

Ten wide-ranging essays
Famous, branching footnotes
Comedy in service of sincerity
A standout title essay on ethics

What holds the disparate pieces together, beneath the jokes and the footnotes, is a single preoccupation: the difficulty and the moral weight of really seeing things as they are. Whether the ostensible subject is a crustacean's nervous system or the grammar wars or a candidate on a campaign bus, Wallace keeps circling back to the cost of inattention and the rarity of honesty. That underlying seriousness is what lifts the collection above its own cleverness, and it is why readers who finish it tend to return to individual essays for years, finding new turns in the branches each time.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

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Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays?: Yes. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by David Foster Wallace and Robert Petkoff.
Listen free with Audible
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
What formats is Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays available in?: On Amazon, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

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Common questions

What is Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays about?: Consider the Lobster collects David Foster Wallace's magazine journalism from his peak years, and it's the rare anthology where the assignments matter far less than the mind working through them. Sent to cover a Maine lobster festival, Wallace ends up interrogating whether it is ethical to boil a…
Is Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays worth reading?: We scored Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays 4.5 out of 5. David Foster Wallace turns a Maine food festival, a porn-industry awards show, and a war over dictionaries into dazzling, branching essays about how to think, how to live, and how to actually pay attention. The premise is always a doorway, never the destination.

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