---
product_id: 11168877
title: "Both Flesh and Not"
brand: "david foster wallace"
price: "₪100"
currency: ILS
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.co.il/products/11168877-both-flesh-and-not
store_origin: IL
region: Israel
---

# Both Flesh and Not

**Brand:** david foster wallace
**Price:** ₪100
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** Both Flesh and Not by david foster wallace
- **How much does it cost?** ₪100 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.il](https://www.desertcart.co.il/products/11168877-both-flesh-and-not)

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- david foster wallace enthusiasts

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## Description

Both Flesh and Not

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    DFW's Weakest Books Are Better Than Most Writers' Best
  

*by J***R on Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2022*

This is one of three narrative nonfiction / essay collections published by the brilliant, sui generis David Foster Wallace. A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster are both better than this one, but Both Flesh and Not is still a fabulous read that--like all his books--somehow manages [usually with incredible success] to be entertaining and deeply thought-provoking at the same time. There are a few pieces I'd consider duds, and it seems like this one is quite a bit less suffused with verve and significance and pure joie de vivre than those prior two. Given that this was published after his death, if I'm not mistaken, you don't have Wallace's rabid perfectionism to sift out the duds. There are a few self-indulgent pieces that don't offer a whole lot--at least compared with the typical dizzyingly spectacular standards set by this wordslinger-god. Still very enjoyable though, and worth reading [after his first two essay collections, that is].

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    We miss you, Dave.
  

*by J***A on Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2012*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Both Wallace and Not
  

*by T***N on Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2012*

Any Wallace publication is an event especially since his unique voice has been prematurely silenced.  Unfortunately, Both Flesh and Not is a not altogether successful  effort sweeping together previously uncollected pieces.  The fifteen essays, some as thin as a few pages in length, are supplemented by many pages of word lists that Wallace apparently kept updating on his computer.More than half of the essays are devoted to literary subjects including an NYT Book Review of a Borges biography, the introduction to the 2007 edition of Best American Essays and a lengthy, and somewhat challenging, discussion of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. In another entry, Wallace presents the young novelists of the eighties as products of university training and television ubiquity before predicting that, despite these challenges, his peers "are going to make art, maybe great art, maybe even  great art change."The most accessible works in this book, however, include a tennis piece originally titled "Federer as Religious Experience."  On full display here are Wallace's deep knowledge of and love for the game of tennis.  In his paean to the skill of Federer, Wallace tells of the evolution of the power baseline game made possible by improved racket technology while giving some idea of what it looks like to stare down the barrel of a 90 mph volley in real life as opposed to the foreshortened view of a television screen.Wallace improbably makes a readable entry out of Terminator 2.  This movie has seminal impact, he argues, because it is the first great example of special effects porn (6 scenes of action between vast stretches of banality.)  Wallace posits the Inverse Cost and Quality Law: "The more lavish and spectacular a movie's special effects, the shittier the movie is going to be in all non-F/X aspects."His genius is most conspicuously on display in his Wittgenstein analysis and as he brings his own unique perspective to often discussed public issues like the HIV virus and 9/11.  Wallace poses unasked questions from unusual angles.  In Back in New Fire, the author wonders if the danger of heterosexual AIDS will increase sexual passion by adding risk.  "Nobody'd claim that a lethal epidemic is a good thing," says Wallace, but "an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion, prices for choices."  A short entry about 9/11 asks whether we should consider a minimum baseline vulnerability to terrorist attack as part of the price of the American idea much as highway deaths are an assumed cost of the mobility and autonomy conferred by the automobile."We need narrative like we need space-time. It's a built in thing," submits Wallace.  His fiction and non fiction support this vision.  Both Flesh and Not is not his finest effort but it is Wallace, and that makes it readable at worst and, in its finest moments, compelling.

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*Product available on Desertcart Israel*
*Store origin: IL*
*Last updated: 2026-02-22*