Behind Infinite Jest’s new 30th anniversary redesign.
On February 3, 2026, Back Bay Books will publish a special edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, complete with a new cover and a new foreword by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, to celebrate the cult American novel’s 30th anniversary.
The new cover was designed by Gregg Kulick, Executive Art Director at Little, Brown. “When the idea of repackaging Infinite Jest for its 30th anniversary came up, I was immediately excited to work on it,” he told Lit Hub.
The original cover’s sky has become such an iconic part of the book’s identity that it felt important to keep that as the core of the design. The sky suggests openness and possibility, but I also wanted to find a way to hint at the book’s darker, more obsessive themes.
When I was a kid, I used to fill pages of notebooks with tiny dots—an odd, almost meditative habit. I’m not sure I can fully explain why that came back to me for this project, but something about making the title out of dots felt right: the contrast between expansiveness and fixation felt very much in the spirit of the novel. I found a sky image from old advertising to use as the backdrop and set the type, then spent hours filling each letter with dots. It’s the kind of process where you can’t really tell how it will look until every dot is in place.
In the end, the experience of making the cover felt appropriately demanding—almost intentionally so. There was something fitting about the design requiring a bit of its own obsessive effort.
Here’s the final cover:
You can preorder the book here.
While you wait for it to arrive, perhaps you might read about how David Foster Wallace used compromise aesthetics to sell Infinite Jest; or about translating the novel into six different languages (not to mention Farsi); or Tom Bissell on his theories about the book’s timeless brilliance; or Jonathan Russell Clark on reclaiming David Foster Wallace from the lit-bros?
