Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
2 Rating(s)
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

Oblivion
Stories

Author: David Foster Wallace

Narrator: Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 14 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/07/2012


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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Oriana on April 11, 2012

Oh boy. Oh man, do I have a lot to say about this here book. I can't even begin to tackle it as a whole entity, so I'm going to do a review of each story, unless I get tired and have to smoosh. Also: I am the kind of person who listens to all my music on shuffle, which means I clearly have no respec......more

Goodreads review by Oscar on March 03, 2024

Lo que está claro es que los libros de David Foster Wallace, o te gustan o no te gustan. Personalmente, prefiero cuando le da más importancia al fondo de la historia, que a la forma de contarla. Cuando no me gusta es cuando experimenta. En este sentido, 'Extinción' es el libro que más me ha gustado......more

Goodreads review by MJ on January 03, 2012

I don’t think collections serve Foster Wallace well: it seems to me his stories would read better as stand-alones on some thoroughly modern internet webshite, with accompanying artwork or explanatory hyperlinks, rather than modishly festering on some fading acid paper alongside all the other fuddy-d......more

Goodreads review by cypt on December 12, 2021

TL;DR: NEARTIKULIUOTAI BANDAU PAPASAKOTI, KAD LABAI PATIKO Turbūt viena iš pačių keisčiausių ir gal net sudėtingiausių skaitytų grožinių knygų. Aš irgi iš tų, kurios ir kurie lentynoj eksponuoja dar nepradėtą "bet jau tuoj tuoj" Infinite Jest, bet vis tiek pirmai pažinčiai su DFW sulaukiau LT variant......more

Goodreads review by Leo on October 10, 2017

For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files. - from Nabokov's Pale Fire RE-READ: Read this for the third time recently. It wasn't pleasant. Not to say the stories were affe......more