Freshman year I bought a book called Infinite Jest that was 1000-plus pages long. I read on Amazon.com that the author was similar in nature to one of my then-favorites, Kurt Vonnegut. But nothing really prepared me for David Foster Wallace.

What I got in Infinite Jest turned my whole idea of what fiction is and could ever be upside down, inside out, and I've read just about everything Wallace has written. Two of these included a book on the creation of infinity called Everything and More, which most people would cringe at when they picked it up, and a piece called Up Simba! about John McCain that is only available in its complete form as an e-book you can only read on your computer. It was the kind of situation in which high-tech turns pain in the ass. But for Wallace's writing, it was worth sitting at a computer screen for hours to finish it.

I was like an ecstatic Harry Potter fan (yes I screamed like a little girl and/or boy; I mean that's who those books are meant for, right?) when I found out that Wallace had a new collection of short stories, Oblivion, which came out in June. There were only two copies at the bookstore; now there is only one. I apologize, but part of me is glad that people haven't caught on to this phenom of fiction.

Of course, many "high-brow" publications review his stuff, because that's the kind of people who read him: people who are overly pretentious English majors, which is a category I've been informed that I belong to.

Anyway, those said publications have called him everything from a "show off" to an individual that makes Faulkner's sentences look like Hemingway. And both of these things are true. Wallace's fiction is complicated. There's no real getting around it.

But, with Oblivion he has fulfilled what made me finish the revoltingly complex Infinite Jest in the first place; no writer has captured the essence of what life is like in 20th century corporate America with startlingly psychological detail like he can. And short stories are mostly a dead spot in American fiction, but an art form that is worth a better look. I mean, people watch pointless sitcoms all the time, so why don't they have the patience to concentrate through twenty-or-so pages for an entertaining experience?

In Wallace's first story, "Mr. Squishy," he forms a scenario in which a marketing director at a snack-cake company has to run an analysis on a focus group to find the marketability of a new product. The snack cake's name, Felonies!, describes the mentality of people attempting to stick to a strict diet by insinuating that it's a crime to eat such a treat.

While most people might shrug this off as a boring, corporate scene, the social critique in the story is sad, as Wallace shows people to be mere pawns in the giant, schematic advertising-heavy modern age.

If you've never thought about the psychology of advertising, (you know, the whole evil thing known to pull on our innermost psychological fears, emotions and desires in order to sell us products that we don't really need), you will after you read "Mr. Squishy."

While "Mr. Squishy" sprawls for a novella-length 66 pages, Wallace reaches for the gut of fiction in the story, "Incarnations of Burned Children." Emotional, visceral and unmentionably unbelievable, "Incarnations of Burned Children," reads like a sweating, shaking panic attack in a short stream-of-consciousness piece about a mother and father freaking out when their child gets covered in boiling water. It sounds so benign when I write it like that, but Wallace's word choice and punctuation makes "Incarnations of Burned Children" a literal religious experience.

But nothing can really prepare you for the last story in Oblivion, "The Suffering Channel." The plot is ludicrous: a reporter for Style magazine wants to do a piece on a man who literally defecates pieces of art. What ensues is the magazine editors claiming that the general public does not want to read about feces, and more intriguingly, conversations in the Style office revolving around the infamous No. 2. It points to important social morés around a completely natural body function, America's obsessive-compulsive relationship with voyeurism and the soul of a tormented "artist," and the story is freaking hilarious.

And if a writer can put poop in a serious context, you have to read him. So, while everyone else is reading Michael Moore or The Da Vinci Code this summer, do yourself a favor and check out Oblivion. You won't regret it.