Oblivion: Stories

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.

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Girl With Curious Hair
• The Pale King
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
• The Broom of the System: A Novel (Penguin Orange Collection)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
• Infinite Jest
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace