Wallace conjoins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite convolutions 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 retelling the daydream that kept his son from noticing his fourth grade substitute 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'). The man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring, the parolee who carries his spider collection with him on the bus, the market research professional whose office anxieties take a morbid turn-each of these is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once absurd and painfully real. Oblivion is a welcome new creation from the writer 'whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction' (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

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