String Theory collects five of David Foster Wallace's essays on tennis, written between 1990 and 2006, ranging from a wind-swept account of playing junior tennis in the Illinois flatlands to profiles of journeyman pro Michael Joyce, a takedown of a ghostwritten Tracy Austin memoir, and a rhapsodic meditation on Roger Federer. Wallace turns matches, tournaments, and the machinery of professional sport into occasions for thinking about genius, effort, and what a body under extreme pressure can reveal about consciousness itself. Together the pieces argue that tennis, watched and described closely enough, is as demanding an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit as any art form.
Books mentioned in String Theory (4)
Beyond Center Court: My Story by Tracy Austin: “Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow.”
Short Circuit by Michael Mewshaw: “AP reporter Michael Mewshaw's Short Circuit (Atheneum, 1983) is just one example of national-press stuff about drugs on the tour.”
The Art of the Engineer by Ken Baynes and Francis Pugh: “Bayne and Pugh's The Art of the Engineer and Cheiro's Language of the Hand proved to be the best airfoils—so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I could not just neutralize but use an in-your-face gale for biking.”
Cheiro's Language of the Hand by Cheiro: “Bayne and Pugh's The Art of the Engineer and Cheiro's Language of the Hand proved to be the best airfoils—so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I could not just neutralize but use an in-your-face gale for biking.”