Paperback: Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace (Penguin, £9.99)

 
William Leith10 October 2013

A collection of essays by the late David Foster Wallace. They are visceral and spiky. And brilliant. He thinks that Aids might have given sex a seriousness it had lost. Sex in history, he says, was a serious business. And then, for a while, it wasn’t. Now it is again. As a very young man, Foster Wallace played on the professional tennis circuit; here he writes about the startling grace of Roger Federer; his writing has a similar fluency and skill. He really nails what’s so good about watching top-class athletes in action. There’s a great essay about his contemporaries, such as Bret Easton Ellis. So sad he killed himself.

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