Review by Booklist Review
This posthumous volume, appearing in the wake of D. T. Max's much-discussed biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (2012), gathers 15 previously uncollected essays. Six are book reviews, 3 discuss the contemporary state or art of writing, 2 address tennis, and 1 is about Terminator 2. The remainder cover a range of Wallace's wide-eyed, isn't it weird we take things like ad space at the U.S. Open for granted subjects and scarily astute criticism. Published originally between 1988 and 2007, these essays demonstrate Wallace's interdisciplinary approach to both pop culture and abstruse academic discourse. For instance, his formal training in symbolic logic informs his opinion of two, in-his-opinion awful, math novels, Philibert Schogt's The Wild Numbers (2000) and Apostolos Doxiadis' Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (2000), while his familiarity with the actual life and cranium-crunching philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein lends perspective to his appreciation of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988). For Wallace devotees, these essays are required reading. For everyone else, they're sometimes tough to get into but entirely worth the exertion.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wallace's previously unpublished essays are collected in this latest release following his death in 2008. The essays here are gathered from over two decades of the author's writing and cover a variety of topics, including an excerpt from Wallace's personal vocabulary list. Narrating Wallace presents a unique problem: how to handle the many footnotes that are so important in his writing? In this audio edition, dual narrators accomplish this task. Robert Petkoff-who also narrated The Pale King and The Broom of the System-reads the bulk of Wallace's essays, while Katherine Kellgren voices the personal dictionary entries and footnotes. This creates a perfect balance, especially when Kellgren's reading underscores the wry footnotes. Both readers give strong performances alone, but together they manage to accurately recreate for listeners the dry, smart rhythm of the author's prose. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Each essay in this volume of previously uncollected nonfiction is a gem in its own DFW way. The topics are diverse yet representative of Wallace's primary interests, ranging from an entry titled "The (as it were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2" to "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," a piece written in the eighties about American youth culture, television, and an emergent generation of pop-obsessed American novelists. Like so much of Wallace's work, "Conspicuously Young" picks apart an ephemeral cultural moment with great discernment, yet still manages to stand up well decades after publication. There are, of course, deeply informed-yet still deeply pleasurable-nods to theoretical math, Wittgenstein as literature, and tennis as well as Wallace's concerns regarding the perils of consumer culture. The overall effect of this collection is to remind us again just how expansive and talented a writer Wallace was, an author capable of producing profound essays around seemingly mundane details scattered amid the American cultural fabric. VERDICT This book is for all readers of contemporary nonfiction as well as serious fans of Wallace's work.-Jim Hahn, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Previously uncollected essays and reportage by the late author, reflecting his varied interests, from tennis to Borges to higher math. This collection is arranged not in terms of chronology but notoriety: It's front-loaded with three pieces that Wallace fans have long wished to see in book form. "Federer Both Flesh and Not" is a bracing critical study of tennis star Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2006; though Wallace spent face time with the star, quotes are tucked into the author's trademark footnotes, and he writes mainly as a spectator admiring the power of the human body to perform at extraordinary levels. "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" is a potent 1988 essay on the roots of what he felt was largely threadbare minimalist fiction. "The Empty Plenum," an encomium to David Markson's 1988 novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, explores the philosophical machinery behind the book and serves as a careful defense of avant-garde fiction. The remainder of the collection is weaker, composed of book reviews and brief essays on politics, sex and the writing life that feel less impassioned than commissioned. A report on the 1995 U.S. Open is a shallower version of Wallace's infamous cruise-ship article, and a 2001 essay on prose poems fractures the traditional essay form into bullet points to little effect. The best overlooked work here is a set of usage notes contributed to the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus: Wallace has a blast riffing on the fine points of "pulchritude," "unique," "hairy" and other words. To stress his status as a lifelong word maven, the pages between pieces are filled with words and definitions from Wallace's personal vocabulary list, from "croker sack" to "pyknic." Not altogether Wallace's finest work, but it brings some welcome exposure to some of his best pieces.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
