Oblivion Stories

<b>In the stories that make up <i>Oblivion</i>, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.</b><br><br> 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").<br><br> Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.<br><br><b>"Stunning...Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place." --<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b>