Acclaim for David Foster Wallace’s
“What makes Wallace’s work so likely to stand the test of time is how rigorously and aggressively it bent forms into the shape of modern thought.… Wallace had the most sensitive cultural antennae of his generation, and in these essays he goes to war with them, using them time and again, at first, to describe every facet of a thing, to show you its many corrugated surfaces and contradictions, before admitting it is the thing’s mystery that makes it beautiful.… Every one of these pieces, even the tiniest introduction to a collection of prose poems, hums with Wallace’s contrary energy.… They show a mind at work, and it was one of the best this country has seen.”
—John Freeman, Boston Sunday Globe
“One of the best writers of our time.… If you’ve never read David Foster Wallace before, his masterful study of Roger Federer, included in this anthology, is an ideal place to start.”
—Steph Opitz, Marie Claire
“Wallace was his generation’s most eloquent cartographer of the Total Noise society.… He charted the absurdities and sadness of life in this land of hype and hyperbole, and he did so in incandescent prose that was as magical as it was elastic.… At their best these essays remind us of Wallace’s arsenal of talents: his restless, heat-seeking reportorial eye; his ability to convey the physical or emotional truth of things with a couple of flicks of the wrist; his capacity to make leaps, from the mundane to the metaphysical, with breathtaking velocity and ardor.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“David Foster Wallace left the essay form in a different state than it was in before he wrote. He wrote of Federer that he had ‘exposed the limits, and possibilities,’ of his sport. Wallace himself, with mystery and metaphysics galore, did no less for the essay.”
—Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune Printers Row
“Like previous collections of David Foster Wallace’s essays, Both Flesh and Not displays the late author’s vast intellectual curiosity.… The book also features selections from Wallace’s much admired list of dictionary words, as well as twenty-four word notes that he contributed to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Both showcase Wallace’s ever-evolving, intimate, and often humorous relationship with language.”
—The New Yorker
“Wallace’s work impresses itself on you on many levels, perhaps none more piercingly pleasurable than in this fussy, old-fogy-to-the-point-of-crankiness way he wants to get things right, while also acknowledging the impossibility of doing so.… If there has ever been a laureate of difficulty and its virtues, of not just accepting what things seem to be but fighting toward the ‘very important truth,’ it’s David Foster Wallace.”
—Thomas Beller, San Francisco Chronicle