Oblivion

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In the stories that make up <i>Oblivion</i>, 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 (<i>The Soul Is Not a Smithy</i>). 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 (<i>The Suffering Channel</i>). 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 (<i>Oblivion</i>). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.