Along with playing in beloved indie band Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner famously wrote the bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart. Now it looks like she also penned the foreword for the upcoming 30th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace's classic novel Infinite Jest.
An announcement has not yet been made, but the book is available for preorder on Hachette Book Group's website, and Zauner's name is on it. It's slated for release in February of next year. Zauner has spoken about her love for Infinite Jest many times; here's what she told The Fader earlier this year about how the book inspired the latest Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (and sad women):
I started the year in 2023 with Infinite Jest, because I had a lot of time off in 2023 and was getting ready to write a new record and was inspired by things that would typically classify as falling under the “incel canon” umbrella. I guess I just wanted to understand this group of people, and why exactly they gravitate to certain types of art.
It's an extraordinary novel, about a family that goes by the Incandenzas, and the characters [are] all involved in this tennis school. The father made this art film that has this strange, mysterious psychological effect on anyone who watches it. It's also next door to a halfway house, where there's a number of character studies of different characters that are suffering from drugs. I wouldn't compare my album to Infinite Jest, but the one thing it has in common in my mind are stories dealing with graphic, intense moments, human struggle, and loneliness. In my mind, the father on “Little Girl,” his hotel could be looking out on the mega circuit of the boys that are riding around in that song. There are all these borrowed ideas that make you feel like these are character studies of people part of a greater world.
I was drawn to [the] quite difficult writing, and that's what I wanted to do in my own work too. I really wanted to make something that maybe wasn't for everybody, not intentionally, but I just wanted to make what I wanted to make.
The 30th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest is out 2/3/26 via Back Bay Books. Pre-order it here.
