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Both Flesh and Not: Essays

3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 · rating details · 910 ratings · 170 reviews

Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.

Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearl...more

Hardcover, 328 pages

Published November 6th 2012 by Little, Brown and Company (first published November 1st 2012)

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Dec 01, 2012 Jacob J. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays-letters, favorites, 2012

I have a confession. Although of course* I didn’t want (or expect) to dislike this book, at all, I did want to be able to say something that proves I could be brusque with/critical of DFW just as easily as I could gush over/laud him. I wanted to be able to establish my Howling fandom by accentuating my knowledge of his prior collections, and concluding that this one doesn’t quite stack up. But alas, I cannot. Foster Wallace is as sublime as ever (realizing that these essays span many years of hi...more

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Nov 04, 2012 B0nnie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Most of these essays are online. Some of the titles have been changed. Remember - too much reading on a computer leads to this sort of breakfast! Read the book.

Federer Both Flesh and Not
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/spo...

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com...

The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...

Mr. Cogito (view spoiler)...more

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Nov 24, 2012 s.penkevich rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays

Consider the B-sides

As often with posthumous collections, Both Flesh and Not suffers slightly from the fact that these essays were bound together for the simple reason of producing another book to fill the shelves and minds of DFW’s perfervid fans and readers. It was only fitting to release another collection of essays riding on the heels of D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, and with his other posthumous work, The Pale King, having been nominated for the Pulitzer. While all of these essays are av...more

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Dec 05, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: david-foster-wallace, essays

[update: Howling Fantods has removed many links from their Uncollected DFW page, at the request of Karen and Little Brown. Those removed links are not limited to what is included in this collection.]

Distracted and Dystematic (as it were) Reviewerish Thoughts

We have here a partial collection of pieces by DFW yet uncollected and unbound. Unfortunate it is that a greater effort was not undertaken to assemble all or nearly all the unassembled essays and reviews, letters to editors, etc., because any...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Juan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dfw

This is not DFW best non-fiction collection, but neither is it superfluous nor is it inferior.

There is quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction geared towards readers who arguably would be writers and therefore interested in these subjects. These pieces are:

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young: on the effect of TV on young writers in the 80's. Young writers get divided into camps that now seem rather obvious and even dated as some no longer really exist: Workshop manufactured,...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Paul Gleason rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It didn't take me very long to get through DFW's posthumous collection because I'd read most of its essays before. But what's surprising is that I didn't need to reread the essays because I'd internalized them so much. This internalization speaks to the power of DFW's writing - for this reader, at least. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again many times before I shake loose my mortal coil, but DFW's writing seems to be hardwired in my brain.

On to the collection . . .

Which is, as to...more It didn't take me very long to get through DFW's posthumous collection because I'd read most of its essays before. But what's surprising is that I didn't need to reread the essays because I'd internalized them so much. This internalization speaks to the power of DFW's writing - for this reader, at least. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again many times before I shake loose my mortal coil, but DFW's writing seems to be hardwired in my brain.

On to the collection . . .

Which is, as to be expected, terrific. The only reason that I'm not giving it five stars is because it has the feel of an odds-and-sods kind of thing - of a way for the publishers to cash in on DFW's reputation. I mean, does his review of the Borges bio need to be collected? In other words, some of the essays, especially those in the second half of the book, seem to be of minor import. This means that everything from p. 203 on seems kind of tacked on.

But the material that comes before! I've always loved DFW's essays on tennis, and his piece on Federer is one of his finest. I'd already loved Roger before DFW's essay, but the Federer essay made me see the greatest men's player who ever lived in a new light. DFW humanizes the reserved Roger with his humorous and lively prose in this awesome essay. For those of you who don't like RF for being stiff or if you don't understand his brilliance, please read this essay.

The piece on the US Open is also pretty terrific, especially the comments on how Sampras sweats. It's DFW, so the essay is funny and spot on. Don't you want to know how Pete sweats?

DFW's anxiety of influence comes in when he discusses Bret Easton Ellis in the "Fictional Futures" piece. The two writers seem to me to have more in common that DFW is willing to acknowledge. But this essay was written by a very young DFW about a very young BEE. I wonder what DFW would have thought of BEE's later, self-lacerating Lunar Park or the postmodern innovations of Glamorama and Imperial Bedrooms. I think that an older DFW would have liked an older BEE more, although the same can't be said for BEE's take on DFW.

The best essay in this collection - and one of the only ones I hadn't come across before - is on Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Like DFW, I did a lot of philosophy in grad school. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida - really anyone who thought deeply about language and, more specifically, the relationship between being, language, and power - got me all hot and bothered. I've lost a lot of the luster that I've had for theory, but DFW brought it back for me. His claim about the ways in which Markson illustrates the scariness of the early Wittgenstein is tremendous and helps me understand not only Wittgenstein's Mistress a lot better but also the other Markson novels I've read. (Markson is the kind of writer whose books I used to read at Borders, holding my breath to hold in the brilliance of the prose, unable to stop before I finished whatever book I was reading - maybe that's why Wittgenstein's Mistress is the only Markson I own). I love Wittgenstein's Mistress, and DFW made me love it more.

A side note: I bet that Markson does for Wittgenstein what Beckett does for deconstruction. Both writers make difficult theory accessible by dramatizing it and discussing how it relates to the human condition, particularly sadness. But I'd argue that Beckett is better than Markson because of his comedy. Here endeth the side note.

The essay on Cameron's Terminator film as pornography is brilliant and funny. Read it.

The essay on "The Nature of Fun" gets at what it's like to be a writer better than any other essay on the subject I've ever read. I love how DFW expands on DeLillo's Mao II. If you're considering becoming a writer, you need to read this essay. I've shared it with a few friends and family members. It's given me insight into my own writerly psyche and made me think about how I come across to other people.

In conclusion, you need to read this book. It's definitely tougher sledding than DFW's other two collections of essays. It's more theoretical and difficult. But DFW was a lot more than the fun and funny stuff he published in Fun Thing and Lobster. Have fun challenging yourself with this one - and read some Wittgenstein, Markson, DeLillo, Gass, and the other writers DFW cites if you haven't already done so.

P.S. I think that DFW would agree with me that C. McCarthy lost it after Blood Meridian.(less)

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Nov 26, 2012 Nick Craske rated it 3 of 5 stars

Reading David Foster Wallace's 'literary nonfiction' always energises, reinvogrates and stimulates me on mutiple levels. This collection of writing is excellent. From grammatical pedantry to book reviews and a commisioned aftewards for an essay collection, DFW's writing voice is so sincere and has so much depth of character.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is my favourite of DFW's literay nonfiction. I didn't feel as rewarded reading any of the Both Flesh and Not's writing as I did th...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Kitty rated it 3 of 5 stars

I would only recommend this for a DFW completist - if you haven't read his other non-fiction collections yet, start with those. This was all right, but you can kind of see why these essays were not collected yet. Most of the stand-out ones, like the title essay, have circulated among DFW fans already, and some have been mostly published in other collections (the one about young writers, for instance).

Side note - I always have trouble with the essay about Terminator 2. I think he makes his point...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Lachlan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i mean, at this point it's incredibly likely that many of us have probably already hunted down and devoured at least half of the content that's actually going to be in this, but that's no reason to not get excited, right?

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Nov 23, 2012 Webster Bull rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

UPDATED REVIEW, now that I've finished:

We write about what we know, and we know that about which we care. To judge by the essays gathered posthumously in this presumably final collection of nonfiction by David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), the author of "Infinite Jest" cared about the following, and not necessarily in this order:

1. Tennis, especially tennis
2. Grammar
3. Philosophy, in particular that of Ludwig Wittgenstein
4. Contemporary (at the time) fiction
5. Movies, especially pop hits like “Ter...more

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May 07, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

First time I've read anything by him. All I knew in advance was that he was a famous novelist (IIRC my older daughter is/was a fan of Infinite Jest) who committed suicide a few years ago.

Eclectic collection spanning many years and addressing word usage (sort of a personalized Strunk and White 2.0), math, literary criticism, tennis, liberal politics, prose poetry. Funny, hyper-literate, opinionated.

Some quirky stylistics such as the tremendous number of footnotes, in which he placed even not ver...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Ryan P rated it 5 of 5 stars

Insight trumped only by command of voice. Found the essays (even about tennis) gripping and intimate to the point that even the lists of vocab words between essays seemed like sharing something personal.

Favorites (more in subject since style is consistently cool): Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young (discusses the boom of young authors in mid-80's eg Brett Ellis), Empty Plenum: Wittgenstein's Mistress (beautiful thoughts on constructing text), (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Termin...more

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Feb 16, 2013 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: merkins, non-fiction

Not quite up there with ASFTINDA or CTL in terms of sheer stuck-to-the-chair-then-flung-off-the-same-chair-in-squeeing-delight pleasure factor, but BFAN is arguably a more eclectic collection than either, treating us to one courtside tennis feature, one neurotic backstage tennis featurette, an unsurpassable academic-and-not reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a deliciously snotty horn-tooting “we’ve arrived, ma!” for his then-emerging fiction contemps, something vague and unappetising about AIDS...more

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Jan 29, 2013 Lisa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: usa, anthology, non-fiction, review-copy

I’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace, so I was quite pleased when Penguin sent me a collection of his essays entitled Both Flesh and Not. Wallace is the cult author of Infinite Jest (listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die) and also an unfinished novel called The Pale King.

Of course, I was never going to read an essay about Terminator 2 (which is a film I’ve never seen) or the one about Roger Federer (who plays tennis) or about the US Open.

But impressed by this author’s re...more I’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace, so I was quite pleased when Penguin sent me a collection of his essays entitled Both Flesh and Not. Wallace is the cult author of Infinite Jest (listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die) and also an unfinished novel called The Pale King.

Of course, I was never going to read an essay about Terminator 2 (which is a film I’ve never seen) or the one about Roger Federer (who plays tennis) or about the US Open.

But impressed by this author’s reputation as a wordsmith, I flicked through the Table of Contents to see what I might like to read from this collection.

I chose ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ because the essay explores examples of ‘math’s new cachet’ in the book world and I was familiar with some of the texts Wallace discussed. Written in 2000, the essay is about the emergence of books and film about heroes of the mathematical world, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel (1996) or A Beautiful Mind’ by Sylvia Nasar (1998) which inspired the film starring Russell Crowe. Wallace makes the point that to some extent these books depend on the reader having some understanding about higher maths. In this respect, he says, such books are like other kinds of genre fiction in that they tend to be assessed using evaluative criteria more rhetorical than that used for literary fiction. That is, rather than the critic asking ‘is this piece of fiction good?’ the reviewer of genre fiction asks ‘to whom will this piece of fiction appeal?’
In other words, it’s about the audience rather than the intrinsic qualities of the book. And with ‘mathsy’ books (that’s my word, I just made it up) ‘the precise ways in which they’re not very good, will vary directly with how much the individual reader already knows about the extraordinary field’ being dramatised. Higher maths, he says, is beautiful and interesting, but lots of people are scared off it by how hard it can be at the lower levels that one needs to work through in order to reach the pinnacle.

Well, I’m not about to argue with the likes of David Foster Wallace but I have to say that even though I didn’t understand all the maths and science in Seduced by Logic, by Robyn Arianrhod, I still found it a very interesting book. Of course he could not have read this one because it was published only last year.

But Wallace had also obviously never read Sue Woolfe’s Leaning Towards Infinity (2000) either, (perhaps because books by Australian authors failed to attract his attention), but if he had he would surely have included it in his musings because it was a much better book than Fermat’s Last Theorem, and by the sound of them, the other books he discusses as well.

The publisher has noted that Wallace used to like playing with words and so they have bookended each chapter with vocabulary that he used in the essays, (complete with definitions, of course). In ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ I didn’t actually find any that I had to look up. Just lucky, I guess …

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Jan 18, 2013 Mark Johnson added it

Shelves: essays

This collection of essays by David Foster Wallace will appeal to those who are already Wallace fans, and welcome any chance to read more of his work, regardless of format and, sadly in this case, quality. That Wallace was a master of the essay form is most convincingly demonstrated in his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", especially in the eponymous essay, and in the critique of the state of contemporary American literature and it's producers/consumers entitled "E Unibus Pluram". The...more This collection of essays by David Foster Wallace will appeal to those who are already Wallace fans, and welcome any chance to read more of his work, regardless of format and, sadly in this case, quality. That Wallace was a master of the essay form is most convincingly demonstrated in his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", especially in the eponymous essay, and in the critique of the state of contemporary American literature and it's producers/consumers entitled "E Unibus Pluram". The present collection highlights many of Wallace's most maddening tics and indulgences. Two of the longest essays concern the game of tennis, of which Wallace was a devoted epigone. I must admit to a bias in this regard: the prospect of spending a day swiveling my head back and forth at a tennis match is only slightly more appealing to me than that of having simultaneous root canal and hemorrhoid surgery; the ennui summoned by watching a tennis match is surpassed only by that evoked by reading an essay about watching a tennis match - rather like eating a poorly prepared hot meal cold. The book review of David Markson's novel "Wittgenstein's Mistress" reads like a hastily prepared term paper for an undergraduate philosophy class. At his best, Wallace had the rare and precious writerly gift of evoking the sense of the tragic through the comic. It is astonishing, and frankly a little sad, that this great novelist chose to wrote an encomium to such a precious and overwrought work of fiction as Markson's. The high points of this collection are a very short essay entitled "The Nature of the Fun" about the craft and process of writing and the lists of unusual words taken from Wallace's notebooks which are interleaved between the essays throughout the book. There is also a poignancy to the penultimate essay, which is Wallace's editor's preface to the 2007 "America's Best Essays". One of the central tropes in this piece is the notion that we are living in an age of information overload - which Wallace calls here "Total Noise". Again, I am surprised and not a little saddened that a lifelong student of philosophy (Wallace's father was a philosophy professor) failed to notice the solipsistic nature of this formulation put forth by someone suffering from severe bipolar mood disorder. Wallace hanged himself just a few months after he wrote that essay. (less)

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Jan 04, 2013 Leo Hunt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Others have said this better, so I'll keep it brief. Although it would be somewhat unfair to describe this collection as a barrel being scraped, it's certainly a B-Sides collection, a release aimed at existing fans. If I wanted to introduce someone to Wallace's excellent non-fiction I would have them read the 'Big Red Son' or 'A Supposedly Fun Thing...' essays, and nothing released in this collection has changed that.

Although the essays collected here are not bad, many are rather short, and alm...more

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Jan 03, 2013 William Hayes added it

This volume of essays by David Foster Wallace is described by the publisher as "a sweeping, exhilarating collection of some of the author's most emotionally immediate work."

- - - - -

In the 1988 essay "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," Wallace discusses "a revolution in the way educated people view the function and possibility of literary narrative."

Language's promotion from mirror to eye, from organikos to organic, is yesterday's news (except in those two lonely outposts, TV and th

...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Vivian Valvano rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a posthumous collection, and the essays range from the 1980s through 2007 (hearbreaking - his suicide was in 2008). I had read some before, but several were new to me. I think it's an excellent collection, exemplary of DFW's skill in the form. All the essays reflect his brilliance to me, but several particularly stand out. His essay on Federer has become a classic, deservedly so, and I doubt that TENNIS magazine could ever be quite the same after sending him to cover the U. S. Open. His...more

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Dec 25, 2012 Julia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays

this is more like three stars in comparison to dfw's two other books of essays. i mean, i wasn't expecting something as good as those anyway, since this is a posthumous hastily compiled thing meant to fill the post-death greed for More DFW (and which dfw probably wouldn't have all wanted compiled), so i'm not disappointed. after all, i did want More DFW. and a lot of the stuff in here was great. especially nice touch was the definitions before each essay. words + definitions // playing with lang...more

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Nov 26, 2012 Ashley Crawford rated it 4 of 5 stars

Both Flesh and Not: [BFAN] Some Thoughts

Was Infinite Jest a Science Fiction novel?

Horrible term Science Fiction – get’s us into all sorts of trouble. Was J.G. Ballard Sci Fi? Was Gravity’s Rainbow? (Read The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction by Jonathan Lethem http://hipsterbookclub.livejournal.co...). Reading BFAN one is reminded of DFW’s love of sci-fi. His essay ‘The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2’ is essentially a love song to James Cameron’s first Terminator movie and t...more Both Flesh and Not: [BFAN] Some Thoughts

Was Infinite Jest a Science Fiction novel?

Horrible term Science Fiction – get’s us into all sorts of trouble. Was J.G. Ballard Sci Fi? Was Gravity’s Rainbow? (Read The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction by Jonathan Lethem http://hipsterbookclub.livejournal.co...). Reading BFAN one is reminded of DFW’s love of sci-fi. His essay ‘The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2’ is essentially a love song to James Cameron’s first Terminator movie and the first Aliens movie – both gritty and hard-boiled (and comparatively small budget) films Wallace has a strong argument here – try it – think ‘Terminator’ and you think of a morphing liquid steel assassin, not the gnarly, visceral and very human desperation of Linda Hamilton in the first film. Special Effects Porn, as DFW puts it, has overwhelmed the memory banks. The first film has sunk below the weight of the effects, not the characters, in the second film.
DFW dabbled with Surrealism and Science Fiction concepts throughout his career. The world of Infinite Jest has as its subtext a world that Philip K. Dick could have made. Sometime in the near future the United States, Canada, and Mexico, have morphed into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a hazardous waste dump known as the Great Concavity to Americans and as the Great Convexity to Canadians. Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, eg; almost everyone’s favorite: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. Les Assassins en Fauteuils Roulants, the utterly surreal Wheelchair Assassins, a Quebecois separatist group, are chasing the missing master copy of a film cartridge titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as The Entertainment – a film is so entertaining that its viewers become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than endless viewings of the film, a concept that in various forms has appeared in a number of sci-fi and horror works from Cronenberg’s Videodrome to The Ring.
Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson, amongst others, has suggested the DFW could well be designated as something of a speculative author. Even The Pale King has hints of an alternate world wherein a tax agent levitates when engrossed in tax returns – a bizarre thought if ever there was one. The Broom of the System. For instance, there's a scene in there when the character Lenore Beadsman is looking down from an airplane at the town East Corinth which has been built to resemble the profile of the actress Jayne Mansfield.

BFAN includes DFW’s rhapsodic review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress – a difficult, if beautiful, book that errs strongly on the side of elements of experimental literature. Indeed, there is no lack of experimentalism in Wallace’s own oeuvre, which leaves one wondering where DFW would have or could have stood vis a vis Ben Marcus’ attack on Wallace’s friend in his Harpers October 2005 issue ‘Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it A correction’ which was, in part, a response to Franzen’s own 2002 essay Mr. Difficult in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis and experimentation in literature as whole. Jest is an experimental novel in many respects. Not doubt the argument would have been a hair-tearer for Wallace.

Neal Stephenson on many occasions has expressed his admiration for DFW and indeed the last collected essays tome I consumed was Stephenson’s Some Remarks which includes an introduction to DFW’s Everything and More. Stephenson and Wallace were poles apart as stylists, but shared a potent fascination for theoretical mathematics (and lengthy tomes; Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon logs in at 1,168 pages while Infinite Jest, 1,088). But in many ways the amongst the key differences between the two authors is the clear evidence that Stephenson is having fun. DFW had a wicked sense of humor to be sure, as evidenced through large swathes of his oeuvre but The Pale King reads like hard and harrowing labor.

Was it the central theme of The Pale King that finally did DFW in? At one point in BFAN he brings up Math Anxiety – a very real condition that incurs a sense of terror when facing numbers. Just a speculation, but the years of research that Wallace put into the Kafkian structures of the IRS would kill just about anyone. I love abstract mathematics, but day-to-day numbers – sorting out my tax return for instance, send me into a state of near catatonia, a deep and abiding nausea. IRS statements are not Godel’s Theorem. Pale King’s central thesis is one of boredom. DFW evidently did monumental research for PK. You tell me – for someone suffering from depression and being accordingly medicated – were tax forms a wise choice for immersion?

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Nov 25, 2012 Raul Clement rated it 4 of 5 stars

I feel strange rating a Wallace book at less than five stars, since he's basically my god. But let's face it, this is a posthumous collection with all its attendant flaws. The typefont is large to disguise the relative brevity of the collection and there are some early or very brief Wallace pieces that I doubt he would have wanted to see reprinted. A few are somewhat embarrassingly outdated. Many of the pieces I had already read and most of the others are book reviews.

That said, there are some...more I feel strange rating a Wallace book at less than five stars, since he's basically my god. But let's face it, this is a posthumous collection with all its attendant flaws. The typefont is large to disguise the relative brevity of the collection and there are some early or very brief Wallace pieces that I doubt he would have wanted to see reprinted. A few are somewhat embarrassingly outdated. Many of the pieces I had already read and most of the others are book reviews.

That said, there are some gems in here that were new to me. "Rhetoric and Math Melodrama" is an excellent review of two books of fiction about mathematicians. This nicely combined two of Wallace's interests -- literature and high math. And "24 Word Notes" was just a lot of fun. And if you haven't read some of the classic Wallace pieces that are in here -- his review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and his piece on Roger Federer, which is perhaps the finest extant work of sports writing -- then the collection is certainly worth it for those alone.

Two biggest complaints:

1) Why change the title of the Federer piece from "Federer as a Religious Experience" to "Federer Both Flesh and Not"? It does give a nice opportunity for a book title, but the lack of a colon or some kind of punctuation is just awkward. And frankly, the original title is just more accurate to the article's themes and purposes. It's not just about how athletes can transcend the body as the new title implies. It's also about OUR experience watching them do so.

2) Why not include "This is Water"? I understand publishers want to milk every last drop out of his estate and including an essay that has already been published as a separate book might lose them a few bucks. But, really, how many more people are going to purchase such a slim, overpriced volume anyway? Besides, it's widely available online (still the only way I've read it). Including it would have allowed them to leave out some of the weaker pieces and still have a bulkier, more varied book.

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Sep 17, 2012 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As might be expected from a posthumous essay collection, this is a bit uneven. The title piece on Roger Federer is amazing, and several other pieces are quite good. But a couple of long pieces from the '80s and '90s were passed over for inclusion in prior collections, and it's apparent why. The one on Conspicuously Young writers rambles, is a kind of stiff, and its discussion of TV's influence on his generation is better fleshed out in "E Unibus Plurum." And his Tennis Magazine piece on commerce...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Michael rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

Thanks to Goodreads First Reads and Anna Balasi for an ARC of Both Flesh and Not.

This book is a collection of 15 essays by the late David Foster Wallace. I felt the title essay on Roger Federer was very good. Other essays, including the one on commercialization of the U.S. Open, the dissection of Terminator 2, and the contribution of the television era to the demise of quality from Conspicuously Young writers were also good. A few others were ok, and a few more I just couldn't get into. David Fo...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1970-present, essays-essay-collections

To give you an idea of DFW's range and brilliance as an essayist:

this collection includes one of the best pieces of sportswriting I've come across, "Federer Both Flesh and Not." The Federer essay is perhaps one of DFW's finest essays overall, and doubles as an incredibly astute bit of aesthetic critique. It is the only thing I've been able to show people who just flat out don't get sports and have them see to some extent, at least, what can be so beautiful about sports.

this collection includes...more

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Apr 18, 2013 Lawrence Garcia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Both Flesh and Not is a wonderful collection of David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction. The selection of the works in this compilation is eclectic, without any unifying elements apart from the fact that they are all written by DFW. This has been and probably will continue to be an issue for some readers who would prefer a more cohesive compilation, but personally, I did not find it an issue and simply went from one essay to another (in no particular order) relishing each as individual pieces.

Of the...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle-reads

another good selection of dfw's non-fiction. really interesting to read 2 articles about tennis, it shows some more insight into his knowledge of the game and compliments infinite jest. also, the critical reviews show and his knowledge of the english language are impressive, to say the least. i also really enjoyed the essay about terminator and the mess that is big budget american cinema.

what impresses me the most is how smart dfw is (actually, sadly was). his writing is extremely sophisticated...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Art rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: howling-fantods

It's worth remembering that all of this is out of context. Both Flesh and Not posthumously compiles articles and essays written for various magazines, dictionaries and anthologies, writings that never appeared in book form. DFW never meant you to read them like this, in this order; still, it holds up pretty well as a kind of literary B-sides & rarities album. The articles about tennis are particularly amazing. Even if, like me, you have no interest in tennis at all, it's hard not to be won o...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

I loved and appreciated this book more than the four stars might suggest. I loved the way it was formated. I loved revisiting essays I had read previously in New York TImes, Salon, the Atlantic, BAE 2007. I loved the ability to again be surprised by DFW's wit, charm, intelligence, and in the last couple essays anger. Having recently lost a loved one in a rather dramatic fashion, I was also taken back those ordurous emotions I felt on September 12/13, 2008 when I heard that DFW killed himself. In...more

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Dec 09, 2012 Kevin Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

I usually have a policy not to read posthumously published work, a policy I've broken for Kurt Vonnegut and DFW (with The Pale King, as well as this work). In all of those cases, I've been disappointed. First, I really didn't like the inclusion of Foster Wallace's word lists here, as they seemed like filler. Also, many of the pieces are not Foster Wallace's best work, and they are clearly not his best work. He seems to be at his best when he enters into an experience (see his essays "A Suppposed...more

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Nov 25, 2012 Carlos Anderson rated it 3 of 5 stars

Let me make this clear before I start this review: I am a huge, dweeby DFW fan and my 3 star rating is not reflective of my appraisal of him as a writer but the collection in comparison with others. I actually greatly enjoyed the reading and i thought the editorial touch of including snippets of DFW's awesomely compulsive list of word definitions (which I had been mimicking in an attempt to acquire, even remotely, his prodigious vocab), which made me feel much less pathetic and DFW much more hum...more

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About David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it fe...more

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“I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibly has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally ETERNAL. If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment's denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they're denials OF. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live.” — 4 people liked it

“For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.” — 4 people liked it

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