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Finite summer: a short story end-of-summer sprint

By Carolyn Kellogg
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Some people started the summer with ambitious plans to read David Foster Wallace’s opus, ‘Infinite Jest’ in a kind of online book group. Aptly dubbed Infinite Summer, the project has now inspired a new summer reading program at the short story website Five Chapters.

Calling its version InfiniteFiveChapters, the website will post 15 short stories in 15 days, beginning Monday, Aug. 24 and ending Monday, Sept. 7.

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Authors whose stories will be included in Five Chapters’ summer send-off include Dwight Allen, Lauren Gronstein and musician Joe Pernice. The grand finale will be from Tod Goldberg, a frequent contributor to the L.A. Times Book Review.

Perhaps it would have been better called FiniteFiveChapters -- because instead of seeming like a marathon-length reading challenge, this is more like a sprint, with the end clearly in sight. Sept. 7 is, sadly, Labor Day: The end of summer really is upon us.

But it’s not here yet for those participating in Infinite Summer: They’ll keep reading until September 22. They do have more than 1,100 pages to get through.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Carolyn Kellogg

Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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