num_pages: 329
description: 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.
language: English
title: Oblivion: Stories
titlecomplete: Oblivion: Stories
genres: Fiction, Unfinished, Contemporary, The United States Of America, Philosophy, American, Literary Fiction, 21st Century, Literature, Short Stories
ratings_count: 14238
publisher: Little, Brown and Company