Robin Hemley

Oblivion Robin Hemley

"Like language, like summer, like love, OBLIVION is irresistible."




Junot Diaz




Robin Hemley's Oblivion: An After Autobiography has that quality that every reader yearns

for-one lies down on a couch and curls up and nothing else is going to happen until one

finishes reading it. I read it one long, delirious day. The work is largely about the "saving" nature

of the imagination. It's surprisingly funny and always utterly, mortifyingly serious. The book is

also very much about being a writer, an artificer, and being willing to do anything to get the

words out-anything? Apparently so. What makes Oblivion profound is that it's about a writer's

hope to escape oblivion, and how universal a human yearning that is, because every human

being is utterly terrified of death and oblivion, and we all contrive ways to tell ourselves that we

won't be forgotten. It's Hemley's best book-the book he was born to write and has been

dying, as it were, to write his whole life. I truly admire and love the book. - David Shields,

author of The Last Interview and Reality Hunger