David Foster Wallace

essays

Both flesh and not

Will Vunderink

These essays are not among Wallace's best work; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster are much stronger collections. Some of the early pieces here show DFW still finding his way into the essay form, and it's no surprise that they haven't been anthologized until now. But for a DFW completist, there's plenty to enjoy: he gives his classic treatment to Federer, Borges, 1980s fiction, and words, his best and constant subject (in "Twenty-Four Word Notes" and in the reappearing interstitial list of words accompanied by definitions and notes on usage).

Gavin

Bravura essays from all over the cultural instant he encompassed and abruptly let go (1988-2007). 

They are I suppose dregs, but DFW’s dregs are better than the decade-projects of others. You can’t help seeing foreshadows of Infinite Jest: he touches on 1) the obsessive, commercial, and religious aspects of pro tennis, 2) the obstacles to good prose about or involving maths, 3) self-conscious engagement with pop (for how else can we understand a world constituted by and obsessed with pop?), 4) ‘interpretation-directing’ books (like Jest), and above all 5) on the need to build after waves of high-entropy postmodernism, to work past its crucial (but bewildering) negativities. 

It was ‘obvious’ to him that ordinary late-capitalist life is ‘at best empty and at worst evil’. But he was extraordinary; panoptic, judicious and sensationally beautiful, and that wasn’t enough either.

Both flesh and not essays

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