Word: jested
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...only do young novelists exist, but we can even say a few things about what their books have in common. For example, they're getting shorter. Ten years ago novels were expanding rapidly, like little overheated primordial galaxies. Chunky, world-devouring tomes like Wallace's Infinite Jest and Franzen's The Corrections were supposed to be the wave of the future, as if the ominously burgeoning complexity and interconnectedness of contemporary reality demanded correspondingly fatter books to embrace them. Now, writers are more likely to immerse themselves in a single time and place, and at more portable lengths. The cosm...
...Dulles, and its forehead had an indentation, consistent with a lifetime of pressing one's head against stone or dirt to highlight one's commitment to Allah. "If it turns out to be Zawahiri's head, I hope you'll bring it here," Bush told his briefers - "half in jest," Suskind writes. But DNA testing ultimately revealed the skull wasn't Zawahiri's. It was shipped off to an FBI warehouse on Staten Island...
American fiction is in a satirical mood. Sometime in the 1990s--David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest makes a handy point of reference for weary travelers-- the earnest, rock-hewn realism of the Raymond Carver school gave way to a more fluid, molten hyperrealism. The widespread conviction that truth has become stranger than fiction triggered a kind of strangeness inflation, an arms race of exaggeration, wherein novelists satirically augment and amp up and overclock their fictions in an attempt to keep up with the sheer implausibility of real life...
...close in the tiny Balinese village of Tegalcangkring, no one in the audience appears overly excited. The men begin to file out while several women and children applaud and compliment the dancer on her performance. One mother proffers a small donation, but then pulls her hand back in jest. "Oops, I better be careful," she says with a smile. "If the new anti-pornography law gets passed I could be arrested." The Balinese are still able to joke, but they worry that if the law goes through unamended, smiles will be few and far between...
...violating postering regulations does nothing to make it less of a farce. My quest to find people who don’t take it all so damn seriously has been in vain—Grimeland and Tom D. Hadfield ’08, my initial hope for sublime jest, are graver-than-thou in their millenarian hopes that the University and alumni will cough up a total of $12 million to fund an endowment to improve undergraduate life. If only they were making a joke—are they?—they would have my vote in a flash...