A collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace that explore the different ways people live their lives.

Dr. Edwin Spindrift has been sent home from Burma with a brain tumor. Closer to words than to people, his sense of reality is further altered by his condition. When he escapes from the hospital the night before his surgery, things and people he hardly knew existed outside of his dictionaries swoop down on him as he careens through adventures in nighttime London.

Origins explores cosmic science's stunning new insights into the formation and evolution of our universe--of the cosmos, of galaxies and galaxy clusters, of stars within galaxies, of planets that orbit those stars, and of different forms of life that take us back to the first three seconds and forward through three billion years of life on Earth to today's search for life on other planets. Drawing on the current cross-pollination of geology, biology,...