Oblivion: stories - david foster wallace

In the stories that make up this exuberantly praised collection, Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.

In the stories that make up Oblivion , David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.

These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind.

Only David Foster Wallace could convey a fathers desperate loneliness by way of his sons daydreaming through a teachers homicidal breakdown ( The Soul Is Not a Smithy ).

Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ( The Suffering Channel ).

Or capture the ache of loves breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ( Oblivion ).

Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.