The Library of America presents an instant classic of American sportswriting—the tennis essays of David Foster Wallace, “the best mind of his generation” (A. O. Scott) and “the best tennis-writer of all time” (New York Times), in a deluxe hardcover collector’s edition.

Both a onetime “near-great junior tennis player” and a lifelong connoisseur of the finer points of the game, David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis with the authority of an insider, the style of a literary virtuoso, and the disarming admiration of an irrepressible fan. Including his masterful profiles of Roger Federer, Michael Joyce, and Tracy Austin, String Theory gathers all five of Wallace’s famous essays on tennis, pieces that have been hailed by sportswriters and literary critics alike as some of the greatest and most innovative magazine writing in recent memory. Whiting Award–winning writer John Jeremiah Sullivan provides an introduction.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a writer for The New York Times Magazine and the Southern Editor of the Paris Review. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, two National Magazine Awards, and a Pushcart Prize, he is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son and Pulphead: Essays, which The New York Times called “the best and most important collection of magazine writing since David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

This special publication features a debossed cover, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.