Oblivion
Stories
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Jun 8, 2004
- Page Count
- 336 pages
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN-13
- 9780759511569
Price
$9.99Price
$12.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $9.99 $12.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
- Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
Buy from Other Retailers:
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 father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's 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 love's 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.
"Stunning…Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place." —San Francisco Chronicle
These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's 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 love's 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.
"Stunning…Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place." —San Francisco Chronicle
Genre:
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“Breathtakingly smart”Time
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“The stories of the infinitely talented David Foster Wallace transport the lucky reader into an absurd and magnificent Oblivion.”Vanity Fair
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“A peerless combination of intelligence, compassion, and lyricism that needs no apology or qualification.”Elle
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“Stunning…Wallace is an astounding storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place.”San Francisco Chronicle
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“If there is a literary avant-garde remaining in American fiction today, then David Foster Wallace is its leader.”Newark-Star Ledger
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“Wallace is a writer who still believes in asking readers to participate actively in the experience of literature, even when he's being aneurysm-inducingly funny.”Toronto Globe and Mail
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“The real joy of reading these stories is not in Wallace ferry us from point A to point B, but in watching his reptilian intelligence slither and snake across the page, flicker out its forked tongue, and nab yet another linguistic fly off the wall.”Denver Post
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“David Foster Wallace's brilliance lies in his ability to expose a character with a mass of bubbling afflictions and life-sustaining neuroses, yet make the reader care deeply for him and his absurd existence.”Chicago Tribune
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“Many of Oblivion's rewards come by way of Wallace's sheer mastery of craft. His sentences cackle and swoon, patiently peeling back layers of artifice that cloak the BIg Questions.”The Onion
