First published 2012
Wallace applies his analytical mind to subjects ranging from tennis champion Roger Federer to writer Jorge Luis Borges. These fifteen essays span nearly twenty years of his nonfiction writing. Wallace dissects Terminator 2 alongside The Best of the Prose Poem. He explores what drives fiction writers and wrestles with how to define the essay form itself. The collection covers undervalued novels and examines which English words people misuse most often. Wallace wrote these pieces for magazines over two decades. The book presents them as he originally intended, without editorial changes. It also includes entries from Wallace's personal vocabulary collection, where he recorded unusual words and their meanings. The essays reveal Wallace's curiosity about both high and low culture. He treats a Hollywood blockbuster with the same seriousness as experimental literature. Wallace questions the nature of creative work while demonstrating his own restless intelligence across diverse topics.
Genres: essays, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, criticism, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: diverse-perspectives, intellectual-discourse
Period: 1990s, 2000s
328 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company