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.

“Stunning…Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place.” —San Francisco Chronicle

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


Quotes

“Breathtakingly smart”—Time

“The stories of the infinitely talented David Foster Wallace transport the lucky reader into an absurd and magnificent Oblivion.”—Vanity Fair

“A peerless combination of intelligence, compassion, and lyricism that needs no apology or qualification.”—Elle

“Stunning…Wallace is an astounding storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“If there is a literary avant-garde remaining in American fiction today, then David Foster Wallace is its leader.”—Newark-Star Ledger

“Wallace is a writer who still believes in asking readers to participate actively in the experience of literature, even when he's being aneurysm-inducingly funny.”—Toronto Globe and Mail

“The real joy of reading these stories is not in Wallace ferry us from point A to point B, but in watching his reptilian intelligence slither and snake across the page, flicker out its forked tongue, and nab yet another linguistic fly off the wall.”—Denver Post

“David Foster Wallace's brilliance lies in his ability to expose a character with a mass of bubbling afflictions and life-sustaining neuroses, yet make the reader care deeply for him and his absurd existence.”—Chicago Tribune