Oblivion

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One of the best - Rated
Unless you work in market research, and as long as you like fiction, you'll be blown away by this. one of those treats that makes you realise we live in a literary sweet shop where you don't have enough time to read all the cutting edge, addictively thrilling fiction there is out there.

Turgid, inscrutable nonsense - Rated
One of the stories is about a focus group discussion. As someone who works in market research, I was interested in reading this story. I was very disappointed. After managing to wade through the super-dense and anally retentive prose, I was left thinking that Wallace clearly had not researched the area. He has no undestanding of the purpose of nature of focus group discussions.

Beyond any other living writer. - Rated
David Foster Wallace has been likened (not especially favourably) of late to Zadie Smith, Thomas Pynchon and even Salman Rushdie, as an exponent of, and member of, a new literary type: the Hyper Realist. This apparent 'new breed' of author is identified by the myriad transgressions and surreal sub-plots, mini-essays and wild tangents that permeate their work, breaking up the traditional narrative flow and making the reader work especially hard for their novel.

What DFW actually does is create such utterly recognisable worlds, with overwhelming clarity and confusing details, as only reality seriously provides, that unless you are very careful you will be sucked into these stories and find your head spinning as you extract yourself and wonder whether it was just a book. His mastery of prose, his swift and accurate turns of phrase and lightning fast chopping and changing from one narrative thread to another is just amazing. Truly he has no real contempories.

In 'Oblivion: Stories' DFW has created a series of short stories, tales and vignettes to enthral and amaze. To read an author at the height of literary power, to be enraptured with stories of the everyday, but told with a use of language that would make any other writer question their own talents, then buy this book.