Essay Collection: Both Flesh and Not

Overview
Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen essays by David Foster Wallace that had not been previously collected, bringing together a range of short pieces and long-form reflections written across different moments of his career. The essays range from rigorous critical readings of other writers and works of art to meditations on mathematics, language, and the ethical responsibilities of the attentive mind. Across these pieces, Wallace's signature mix of encyclopedic knowledge, comic intelligence, and moral seriousness remains front and center.
Rather than offering a single method or subject, the collection functions as a series of encounters with thinking itself: formal analysis rubbing against personal observation, densely packed footnotes puncturing rhetorical moves, and close reading that often turns into a kind of philosophical self-interrogation. The result is a portrait of an essayist who sees ideas as lived things rather than mere abstractions.

Themes
A persistent concern is how seriousness and attention relate to art and to everyday life. Essays on mathematics and logic consider not only formal properties but also the way abstract structures shape feeling and ethical imagination. Discussions of other writers probe how literary form can open moral and perceptual possibilities for readers, while often asking whether critical admiration can become a form of self-deception.
Language and empathy appear as twin preoccupations. Wallace often treats language as a tool for mapping inner complexity, but he also worries about the temptations of rhetorical virtuosity that hide rather than reveal humanity. This tension, between intellectual display and humane attention, drives much of the collection's energy.

Style and Voice
The tone shifts between playful, deadpan wit and sudden, earnest gravity. Wallace's sentences can be elaborate and digressive, but his digressions usually serve to clarify rather than to obfuscate. Footnotes and asides function less as novelty than as a way to model an engaged, self-correcting intelligence that is wary of grand claims yet committed to deep inquiry.
Humor and precision coexist: jokes and pop-culture references sit beside passages of close, sometimes painstaking explication. That juxtaposition produces a signature rhetorical effect, an impression of a mind continually recalibrating itself, trying to remain honest about its own limits while pressing arguments as far as they will go.

Notable Approaches
Wallace frequently performs close reading that doubles as philosophical probing, turning literary analysis into a vehicle for larger questions about value, seriousness, and how to live. Essays that take mathematics as a starting point use examples of proof and paradox to illuminate broader intellectual habits, while pieces on art and criticism examine how form shapes moral perception and how criticism can either sharpen or blunt a work's ethical force.
The essays move comfortably between disciplines, showing Wallace's willingness to treat mathematical and aesthetic problems with the same inquisitive seriousness. That interdisciplinarity models a form of attention that privileges curiosity and rigorous specificity over ideological summary.

Reception and Legacy
Readers and critics have valued the collection for displaying Wallace's range beyond his better-known fiction, offering a fuller sense of his critical apparatus and intellectual priorities. The essays have been read both as demonstrations of virtuoso thinking and as documents of an ethics of attention, work that insists on the demands of sustained care in reading, writing, and living.
For those already attuned to Wallace's voice, the pieces deepen appreciation of his blend of erudition and compassion. For newcomers, the collection can serve as an entry point to an essayistic practice that sees language as a means of enlarging, not merely displaying, the self.