Oblivion

Overview

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

Editorial Reviews

In his best work, Infinite Jest, Wallace leavened his smartest-boy-in-class style, perfected in his essays and short stories, with a stereoscopic reproduction of other voices. Wallace's trademark, however, is an officious specificity, typical of the Grade A student overreaching: shifting levels of microscopic detail and self-reflection. This collection of eight stories highlights both the power and the weakness of these idiosyncrasies. The best story in the book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," assembles a typical Wallaceian absurdity: a paroled, autodidactic arachnophile accompanies his mother, the victim of plastic surgery malpractice ("the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times"), on a bus ride to a lawyer's office. "The Suffering Channel" moves from the grotesque to the gross-out, as a journalist for Style (a celebrity magazine) pursues a story about a man whose excrement comes out as sculpture. The title story, about a man and wife driven to visit a sleep clinic, is narrated by the husband, who soon reveals himself to be the tedious idiot his father-in-law takes him for. While this collection may please Wallace's most rabid fans, others will be disappointed that a writer of so much talent seems content, this time around, to retreat into a set of his most overused stylistic quirks.
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Author Information

Bio of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace is the author of Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System, and Girl With Curious Hair. His essays and stories have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Playboy, Paris Review, Conjunctions, Premiere, Tennis, The Missouri Review, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Wallace has received the Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, the QPB Joe Savago New Voices Award, and an O. Henry Award. David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008 On those rare occasions that David Wallace visited our offices in New York City, execs lined up to clap him on the shoulder and shake his hand--one of the many forms of acclaim that made David very, very uncomfortable. He would deflect compliments firmly and turn the conversation to praising the editorial or publicity assistant he had most recently spent hours on the phone with. Everyone who worked with David has used the word "kind" in describing him. He never failed to be kind, to acknowledge work done on his behalf--copyediting single-spaced manuscript pages, laying out pages with notes embedded in notes, booking tours for an ardent tobacco-chewer with particular needs. He wanted the people he met to know him for who we was, not as a scarily giant intellect or as a bandanna-clad lit phenom. He succeeded completely. Among the most moving notes arriving here recently have been those from young editors and agents who wrote to say that David Foster Wallace's writing was a beacon to them. The idea that they might one day have a hand in bringing work this original and mind-opening and exciting to readers inspired them and drew them to the book business. We will always be grateful that we had the extraordinary opportunity of working with him and knowing him. We will miss him very much.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Little Brown & Company

Filesize

914.65 KB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9780759511569