Both Flesh and Not

Both Flesh and Not: Essays

Company type	Posthumous anthology
Industry	Publishing
Founded	2012
Founder	David Foster Wallace
Products	Essay collection

Both Flesh and Not: Essays is a 2012 posthumous anthology comprising fifteen essays by the American writer David Foster Wallace, representing his third compilation of essays.

List of essays

Throughout the collection, Wallace's lists of rare and unusual words are interleaved with the essays.

• "Federer Both Flesh and Not" (2006), one of Wallace's most celebrated pieces, examines professional tennis through the lens of Roger Federer's exceptional skill. This essay was initially published in The New York Times under the title "Federer as Religious Experience."
• "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" (1988), originally featured in Review of Contemporary Fiction, introduces concepts that Wallace later elaborated on in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
• "The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein's Mistress" (1990) provides a favorable critique of Markson’s avant-garde novel.
• "Mr. Cogito" is a concise, positive review of poet Zbigniew Herbert's work, published in Spin magazine in 1994.
• "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open" (1996) offers a first-person perspective on the 1995 U.S. Open, written for Tennis magazine.
• "Back in New Fire" (1996), which addresses sexuality during the AIDS crisis, was first released as "Impediments to Passion" in Might magazine.
• "The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2" (1998) critiques how massive visual effects budgets influence filmmaking; it was initially titled "F/X Porn."
• "The Nature of the Fun" (1998) contemplates the craft of writing fiction and appeared in Fiction Writer.
• "Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. novels >1960" (1999), published on Salon.com, highlights five American novels by William H. Gass, Jerzy Kosiński, Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, and David Markson that have not received adequate recognition.
• "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama" (2000), appearing in Science, reviews mathematical novels by Philibert Schogt and Apostolos Doxiadis.
• "The Best of the Prose Poem" discusses an international anthology of prose poems, featured in Rain Taxi in 2001.
• "Twenty-Four Word Notes" (2004) is reprinted from the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.
• "Borges on the Couch" (2004) critiques Edwin Williamson’s biography of Jorge Luis Borges in a review for the New York Times Book Review.
• "Deciderization 2007—A Special Report" serves as the introductory essay for The Best American Essays 2007.
• "Just Asking" is a short political commentary published by The Atlantic in 2007.