Composition and Publication
The collection's writing “overlapped” with Wallace's last novel, The Pale King, and many of the stories came from notebooks that he used to write the book and may have begun as sections of it.
Wallace first suggested a new collection of stories to his editor Michael Pietsch in October of 2001. Much of the editing appears to have been completed by October 2003. Published in June of 2004, the book sold eighteen thousand hardcover copies in its first year.
Read more about this topic: Oblivion: Stories
Famous quotes containing the words composition and, composition and/or publication:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)