Oblivion cover art

Oblivion

Stories

Preview

Audible Standard 1-month free trial

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo + applicable tax after 30-day trial. Cancel Anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

Oblivion

Written by: David Foster Wallace
Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
Try for $0.00

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $41.99

Buy Now for $41.99

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
Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Short Story Witty Funny
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

What the critics say

“Stunning…Wallace is an astounding storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place.”—San Francisco Chronicle
All stars
Most Relevant
Robert Petkoff gives a tour de force performance--very enjoyable; even if the subject matter of these complex, highly detailed works of art could scarcely be bleaker.

Perfect performance of a modern classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.