The time is right for “The David Foster Wallace Reader,” an anthology meant to serve different purposes for different readers. For the casual ones, if Mr. Wallace has any, it’s a solid but compact Greatest Hits collection: David Foster Wallace Lite. After all, he is best known for “Infinite Jest” (1996), a 1,079-page novel that by itself is more than 110 pages longer than this collection.

As a reintroduction, or even introduction, to Mr. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, it’s a reminder of what a transgressive, digressive delight he could be. For teachers, it’s a textbook geared to orthodoxy-free students who can pierce the carapace of Mr. Wallace’s reputation and read his work with fresh eyes. And even for those who race through it, it’s a jolt of sheer genius — and a horror. There are immense, intricate, leisurely pleasures to be had here, and they should not be glimpsed like the landscape from a speeding train.

This book’s editors have tried to span the full range of his talents, knowing full well what an impossible task that is. All they can do is offer a selection of his fiction (excerpts that amount to 600 pages’ worth of text), then add a smaller sampling of his nonfiction and journalism.

The novelty material that bridges the gap between fiction and nonfiction sounds more exciting than it turns out to be. This is a selection of both Mr. Wallace’s teaching syllabuses (Renata Adler, George Saunders, J. D. Salinger and Joan Didion were among the writers he taught) and the emails full of grammatical arcana that he delightedly exchanged with his mother and fellow teacher, Sally Foster Wallace.