Oblivion: Stories - Softcover

Wallace, David Foster

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316010766 ISBN 13: 9780316010764

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2005

Synopsis

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. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

About this title

Review:

""David Foster Wallace has earned a place as one of America's most daring and talented young writers....His eye for cultural detail is ever sharp, his humor ever dry."

Book Description:

* A brand new short story collection from 'the most significant writer of his generation' (TLS)

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0316010766
• ISBN 13: 9780316010764
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330