From Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Some critics scream self-indulgence, while others lash back with claims of genius. No one denies the verbal wizardry of the MacArthur Grant-winning author of Infinite Jest. And yet Wallace’s prose style lies at the epicenter of the debate. Does his wordiness obscure a lack of substance, or is the key to his intent found in that same verbosity? Reactions to his stories elicited similar controversy. More than one of his boosters notes a welcome turn towards naked emotion, most notably in “Good Old Neon.” Others question his maturity and moral sense, and criticize the unfinished quality of some of the stories. These polarized opinions, however, seem to ensure that Wallace will not fade into oblivion.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
An all-male focus group convenes in a Chicago office building to sample a new form of junk food under the omnivorous eyes of a psychotic statistician, while on the street a crowd gathers to watch a possibly armed man scale the glass tower. A journalist investigates an Indiana man who makes art out of his "miraculous poo." A couple goes to a sleep clinic to resolve a snoring conflict. So it goes in Wallace's first short-story collection in five years, a high-wire performance by the star of kinetically cerebral fiction. As questing a philosopher (his last book, Everything and More [BKL O 15 03], is a history of infinity) as he is a canny storyteller, the author of Infinite Jest (1996) fashions complex tales rife with shrewd metaphysical inquiries, eviscerating social critiques, and twisted humor. Profoundly intrigued with the paradoxes of being, the haphazard forging of the self, and the relentless cascade of consciousness, he has one of his obsessed narrators bemoan language's inability to convey the psyche's wildness, yet Wallace's torrential prose comes awfully close. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
The first new fiction in five years from one of the most prodigiously talented and original writers at work today.
Download 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 ilis 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 painfully 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).
About the Author
David Foster Wallace is the author of several books including Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and numerous other awards.
Oblivion: Stories FROM THE PUBLISHER
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).
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
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. Agent, Bonnie Nadell. 5-city author tour. (June 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Lots of weird stories from the irrepressible author of Infinite Jest, featuring such characters as a parolee who carefully guards his spider collection. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Media overkill and other forms of contemporary paranoia and mendacity take their lumps in this third collection from the brainy postmodernist author (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 1999, etc.). The most conventional of its eight impressively varied stories is "The Surfing Channel," the raffish satirical account of trendy Style magazine's research into the personal history of a popular sculptor who works in the medium of human excrement. How he produces his art is about what you'd expect ("Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn't"), and Wallace's deadpan depiction of his manufactured celebrity is both hilarious and, uh, fundamentally silly. Elsewhere, we encounter an ad agency manipulating public hunger for a cholesterol-laden product ("Mr. Squishy"), a possibly suicidal yuppie devoted to obsessive analysis of his own "fraudulence" ("Good Old Neon"), and the story (told in conversations overheard during a business flight) of an "omniscient child" born in a Third World rain forest and commercially exploited by his fellow villagers ("Another Pioneer"). But Wallace is as versatile as he is facile, capable of such contrasting stunners as a blistering vignette that describes in headlong charged prose the accidental severe burning of a toddler and his parents' panicked efforts to save his life ("Incarnations of Burned Children") and the volume's two standout pieces. In "The Soul is Not a Smithy," a depressed, lonely father sorrowfully recalls a violent episode at his son's elementary school, an episode that the distracted boy survived almost without noticing it: a terrific story, in which the generation gap yawns unbridgeably. Then there's "Oblivion," the narrative ofa 40-ish husband whose wife objects to his nonexistent snoring, leading him to an Orwellian Sleep Clinic, and to question everything he thinks he knows about himself. This ingenious anatomy of incompatibility perfectly illustrates Wallace's genius for combining intellectual high seriousness and tomfoolery with compassionate insight into distinctively contemporary fears and neuroses. One of our best young writers just keeps getting better. Agent: Bonnie Nadell/Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell Literary Agency
Art & Photography
Book Info
