If you like short fiction, I really recommend "Little Expressionless Animals". It's not as much of a complete head-scrambler as some of his other short fiction.

If you like short fiction, I really recommend "Little Expressionless Animals". It's not as much of a complete head-scrambler as some of his other short fiction. If you like journalism, some of his pieces on tennis are astounding, eg "Federer as religious experience" or the one where he follows some guy who's worked his ass off his whole life and is one click below the top tier and will probably never make it (forgotten that one). If you like criticism, "E unibus pluram" (on TV) and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" (about postmodernism, irony and the whole clique of people around Brett Easton Ellis) are both outstanding. For novels, he only wrote 3 (as far as I know) and they're really great. I personally read "Broom of the System" first because I like reading things in order (I've done this with a number of other authors I like). It's a really cool book, very funny and not quite as huge a commitment as "Infinite Jest". So don't feel you have to start with Infinite Jest, you really don't. It's great though, as is "Pale King". Had he lived to complete "Pale King" I think it would easily have been his greatest novel, but in the state it was published in, it's still outstanding.