Congrats, Greg (if you read this blog)!

I searched for "SSMG press", the listed publisher, and got nothing substantive. Is this "silver star media group", which seems to have published something by Mike Tyson? Who is this publisher?

Academic, is my guess.

Should I buy it?

When I get my copy in the mail, I can give you a more informed answer to that question.

Maybe this will help you make a decision:

http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/reviews/copy/1207/elegant_complexity_greg...

Hey, I'm that publisher! Actually, my brother is the owner. But SSMG is short for Sideshow Media Group. We also publish music and films.
Dalkey Archive and some other presses seriously looked at publishing the book, but the market for literary criticism of contemporary fiction is basically nil and none would touch it without the author bringing a subvention in hand. We gave greg a much better deal.
One of the really cool things in the book (and on the back cover) is a commissioned illustration/map of Enfield Tennis Academy. It looks really awesome.

re: it being relatively spoiler-free: is it designed in the style of a guide to the text, a reader's companion sort of thing? I really do like to read literary crit so this is not meant to be a disparaging comment in any way (anyone with the discipline and focus to sustain 500+ pages of publishable analysis and insight gets multiple hats-offs from me), but I would never want to read criticism in tandem with the source text in the case of a work of fiction. I'd rather struggle through what seems incoherent and tackle analysis/clarification later. But maybe that's just me.

My guess is that it means that if you do choose to read it alongside the book, on a section-by-section basis, events that occur later in the book will not be "spoiled" in an earlier section's analysis.

I'm with you Jesse, I'm the sort of person who would rarely if never read criticism in tandem with a book, at least on my first read. But I do plan on re-reading Gravity's Rainbow at some point with one of the companion guides.

It's a good thing if this book encourages even one person to read Infinite Jest who never would have done so without its help.

Note, by the way, that I had an error in my earlier demonstration of Crazymonk's Rule -- evidently it takes at most 524 pages to spoil Infinite Jest. That still makes it better than Harry Potter, Book 6.

it takes one page to spoil infinite jest, but prolly no one notices.

When I got to the third or fourth German phrase of Gravity's Rainbow I bought a "companion guide," and after about 3 entries I stuck it on the bottom of of my bookshelf, where it was hidden by my amp. The one by Wasserstein or whatever his name is. Though it was NOT spoiler-free, it was headed straight for that shelf regardless. Most regretted book purchase of recent memory, without a doubt. Though I don't mean to disrespect the scholarship that went into it, as clearly there was some. The internet is a much better GR-companion though. It's fun to think of a book like that as like a Borgesian window (yep, that's pretentious). The kinda thing that could get you lost in the library for years. However, I would on a second go-round give the companion a second chance.

I'm totally into CR's Rule- and I didn't notice until just now the "don't get all Shannon on me" quip, which made me laugh out loud in the computer lab.

Wait, what were the 524 words?

"it takes one page to spoil infinite jest, but prolly no one notices."
-Wait a minute... is that a barb?

Pages, not words. The book.

I spoke to flea about that statement, and she said it's a reference to the Year of Glad stuff being in the beginning of the book.

Pages. My fault.