A compact collection of Wallace’s writing on tennis, bringing together essays written across fifteen years and introduced by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Wallace had played competitive junior tennis himself, and these pieces sit at the point where his knowledge of the game, his fascination with performance, and his obsession with systems all meet. The essays move from his own Midwestern tennis adolescence through profiles of professional players and reports from the U.S. Open, Federer and the machinery of elite sport. DFW is writing about talent, repetition, freedom, limitation, spectacle, commerce, the strange violence of excellence, and the gap between what an athlete appears to be doing and what their body has actually learned to do without conscious thought.

A very good entry point to Wallace because the subject gives his thinking something physical to push against: less abstraction floating loose, more mind meeting ball at speed.

Library of America, 2016. Seventh printing. Hardcover. Light handling wear; clean and sound.