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Both Flesh and Not Essays David Foster Wallace 9780316182379 Books

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Both Flesh and Not Essays David Foster Wallace 9780316182379 Books

I had read some of the essays in this collection in other places. My first ever introduction to DFW was in his introduction to the Best American Essays that talked about how one goes about deciding what essay is a best essay. I've read a lot of Wallace's work but I think I finally figured out his Shtick, Wallace will find a very complex subject and then painstakingly make it simple and explain it to you. He will then point out what is absurd or foolish about said subject and leave you feeling like you are the smartest person in the room because you "get" what is so funny about something that you never knew existed a few paragraphs before. His talent for this is on display here in his essays on tennis, language and an outstanding essay about Terminator 2 which turns into an indictment on feminism in films, James Cameron as a sellout etc. Wallace is also at his best as a sensitive human being in essays about our post 9/11 reaction and how we have turned sex into a commodity. I'm proudly going to keep this next to my almost complete library of DFW stuff and I'm glad I took the time to read it.


Tags : Both Flesh and Not: Essays [David Foster Wallace] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <strong>Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by one of America's most daring and talented writers. (<em>Los Angeles Times Book Review</em>).</strong> Both Flesh and Not</i> gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays,David Foster Wallace,Both Flesh and Not: Essays,Little, Brown and Company,0316182370,AMERICAN ESSAYS,American - General,Essayists; Literary critics; Pop culture; American literature,Essays,GENERAL,General Adult,LITERARY COLLECTIONS Essays,Literary Collections,Literature - Classics Criticism,LiteratureClassics,Literature: Classics,Non-Fiction,ReadingsAnthologiesCollected Works,United States

Both Flesh and Not Essays David Foster Wallace 9780316182379 Books Reviews

And so it was that after a long wait, David Foster Wallace's final novel hit the world with a crash! Then, perhaps knocked from the trees by the Pale King's vibrations, came this. If this were another author I'd have given this collection 1 star, but even when Wallace was more interested in showing off how smart he was than in actually saying something with that rocket ship of a brain, he is still an incredibly thought-provoking read. I read this hot on the heels of D.T. Max's biography of Wallace, and the early essays especially feel like ideas that Wallace himself later retreated from and thinking he tried to rectify in his later work. The best piece in here is probably the Federer article from the NY Times Play magazine which is available for free. Check it out; Google's a thing. While this isn't as transparent a cynical cash grab as "This is Water," it doesn't feel like it could be of too much interest to anyone outside Wallace historians, of which there must be at least, what, 30? If you're interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, I highly recommend picking up "Consider the Lobster" instead and moving on to "Oblivion" to see if his fiction writing is for you. If you read Wallace's entire oeuvre and miss this one, you're not missing anything much.
This is a collection of Wallace's less accomplished, perhaps, but nonetheless insightful, charming, fascinating, humorous and moving work. Worth having just for the vocabulary list Wallace put together. Wallace fans will want this book.
So, a writer you like dies. Let's say that they die young. Once you get over the tragedy, you can be mad. It makes sense. You wanted this person to continue to entertain you until the end of your days.

Now that they're dead, they can't do that, and you get angry.

So of course the question to ask is does this person have anything sitting around that can be issued?
David Foster Wallace was nice enough to leave some droppings. First there was an incomplete novel, "The Pale King". It was about a Midwestern IRS employee in the 80s. It was about as fun as splitting together the footnotes to Infinite Jest with the tax code. I couldn't tell you much more. I only got 30 pages in.
For the truth though, I didn't like IJ. I spent a whole summer struggling through it wondering what was so great about all of this - finding flashes of brilliance while working on my carpal tunnel problem. In fact, I have liked DFW more for his essays than his fiction. His two collections that came out while he was alive popped with verve and straight-up awesomeness. He was a more literate version of Chuck Klosterman.

So it is my luck that "Both Flesh and Not" is a collection of his nonfiction.
It is good.
In places.
With caveats.
It is not an organic whole. Some of the pieces are well-thought and developed criticism or insightful sports criticism, while there is a couple of paragraphs that were put up on the internet in the late nineties. This is more of an assemblage or a collage, but it does show the breadth and depth of DFW's mind and concerns.
I'm not going to go piece-by-piece, but one of the last works in the collection I think contains a valediction and a summation of his life (Though utterly impossible) "In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help." (Deciderization 2007 - A Special Report, 316)
We miss you, Dave.
I am a huge David Foster Wallace fan. I would love to give this 5 stars, but I can't. If you haven't read Consider the Lobster, buy that instead. A supposidly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, and of course the brilliant novel Infinite Jest should be on your shelf if they are not already. But sorry to say, there are some good moments, some good essays, but mostly this collection is forgettable.
Great read!
While I firmly believe that time spent reading David Foster Wallace is never a waste, there is nothing in this book that even approaches the excellent of his other essay collections (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Essays and Arguments). While there are some meatier pieces, there are also some pretty trivial bits that I doubt Wallace himself ever would have collected.
Some wonderful essays here, especially the one about Roger Federer, among others. All worth your time and effort.
I had read some of the essays in this collection in other places. My first ever introduction to DFW was in his introduction to the Best American Essays that talked about how one goes about deciding what essay is a best essay. I've read a lot of Wallace's work but I think I finally figured out his Shtick, Wallace will find a very complex subject and then painstakingly make it simple and explain it to you. He will then point out what is absurd or foolish about said subject and leave you feeling like you are the smartest person in the room because you "get" what is so funny about something that you never knew existed a few paragraphs before. His talent for this is on display here in his essays on tennis, language and an outstanding essay about Terminator 2 which turns into an indictment on feminism in films, James Cameron as a sellout etc. Wallace is also at his best as a sensitive human being in essays about our post 9/11 reaction and how we have turned sex into a commodity. I'm proudly going to keep this next to my almost complete library of DFW stuff and I'm glad I took the time to read it.