John Dugdale

A Suitcase of Spiders

Oblivion: Stories

By

Abacus 329pp £12 order from our bookshop

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S writing can be bewitchingly smart, funny and caustic, switching between acerbic satire, romping farce and note-perfect spoofing of American academia, media or corporate idiocy with dazzling facility. He may be ‘so modern he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us’, as Zadie Smith proclaims; but his novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite jest, still accept such old-fashioned duties as entertaining the reader and creating memorable, more or less rounded characters.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us