Oblivion (collection)

Oblivion is a collection of short stories written by David Foster Wallace. Released in 2004, it is the last collection of Wallace's short stories published during his life time.

Stories within[]

Mister Squishy
The Soul is Not a Smithy
Incarnations of Burned Children
Another Pioneer
Good Old Neon
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Oblivion
The Suffering Channel

Publisher's summary[]

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

Works of David Foster Wallace
Novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, The Pale King Short story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion Girl with Curious Hair Little Expressionless Animals, Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR, Girl with Curious Hair, Lyndon, John Billy, Here and There, My Appearance, Say Never, Everything is Green, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way Brief Interviews with Hideous Men A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life, Death Is Not the End, Forever Overhead, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI), The Depressed Person, The Devil is a Busy Man, Think, Signifying Nothing, Datum Centurio, Octet, Adult World, Church Not Made with Hands, Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI), Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko, On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon, Suicide as a Sort of Present, Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV) Oblivion Mister Squishy, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, Incarations of Burned Children, Another Pioneer, Good Old Neon, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oblivion, The Suffering Channel Essay collections and nonfiction Signifying Rappers (written with Mark Costello), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Everything and More, Consider the Lobster, Fate, Time, and Language, String Theory Major and recurring characters Lenore Beadsman, Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, Joelle van Dyne, Rémy Marathe