ABOUT THE BOOK
Publication date: June 1, 2022
Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: Gold Wake Press Collective
ISBN-13: 978-1637527818

More ways to buy online

Oblivion: An After Autobiography

Gold Wake Press Collective, June 2022

When Rock and rollers die, it's often said they go to that "great rock band in the sky." But what about writers? In Robin Hemley's poignant and wildly humorous new book, Oblivion: An After Autobiography, writers go to The Cafe of Minor Authors (the writers who aren;t famous at least). A tale of literary ambition that survives death, Oblivion follows the afterlife of one hapless author searching for a way out of oblivion, who, in the process, encounters old literary friends and enemies, Prague of 1911, the Yiddish theater, Franz Kafka and his close friend, Max Brod, and dybbuks. Like Andrew Sean Greer's Less, but with dead people.

Praise for Oblivion: An After Autobiography

"A mesmerizing meditation on immortality, both the literary and fleshly kinds and its ultimate unattainability… Robin Hemley has written his best (and strangest) book and ginned up a troubled luminous Kafka for our troubled luminous times … like language, like summer, like love, OBLIVION is irresistible." 

– Junot Diaz, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“Every author and artist will recognize the yearning to create works of lasting meaning, and every reader will appreciate the wonderful writing, the imaginative play between these worlds, and the serious exploration, just beneath the wildly entertaining surface, of the power of art to both shape us and sustain us.” 

– Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and The Lake of Dreams

“OBLIVIONis a deeply intelligent and strikingly honest exploration of what ultimately drives a writer to write, and the cold loneliness of the journey, and how literary success in one’s lifetime is, at best, a fickle proposition. I will tell every writer I know, struggling or successful, to read this book.” 

– Kaylie Jones, author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir

“Charming, starkly brilliant, and very funny, Robin Hemley’s OBLIVION is a meditation on writing and the writer’s life, on family, on grief, on death as a second chance—ultimately, on hope. OBLIVION asks important questions about what it means to be a striving artist individually but also among a community of striving artists. I savored every page.” 

– Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees and Harry Sylvester Bird