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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories — which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere — explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Among the stories are The Depressed Person, a dazzling portrayal of a woman's mental state; Adult World, which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque.

Review:

One either loves or hates David Foster Wallace, but he's much more fun to love. Brief Interviews is a collection of 23 short stories, and the form seems to suit him better than the novel – or perhaps it's that the reader can finish a piece of his work within a year. His shortest story in the collection, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," is a whole five sentences long (his novel Infinite Jest was a whopping 1079 pages). However, it perfectly lives up to its title:

"When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces."

The subject matter of these stories range from the bizarre to the banal, but always Foster Wallace's biting humor and eye for the smallest, and most extraordinary of details imbue the tales with a sense of the extreme. Linking the stories is a series of "interviews" with men whose confessions, and the repression revealed within, expose the truly hideousness within the stereotypical "everyman." Foster Wallace writes with an escalating tension, which is only sometimes relieved with deadpan irony. Meanwhile he subverts the story form and has fun with the structures of academia and literature. His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other magazines and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, the John Train Prize for Humor, and the O. Henry Award. Take a merry Postmodern whirl of a ride with one of America's brightest boys. Georgie Honisett, Powells.com

Review:

"In this book he demonstrates his strengths as a stylist, humorist and thinker....one of these stories is easy, but all display an intelligence and a swagger that make them hard to put down." Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

Review:

"...a mixed bag of 23 essays and short stories that display a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off." R.Z. Sheppard, Time

Synopsis:

These eclectic stories explore intensely immediate states of mind with the creative daring that has won Wallace the reputation of being one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation.

Synopsis:

David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In this exuberantly acclaimed collection he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
megcampbell3, October 21, 2007 (view all comments by megcampbell3)
I've read that David Foster Wallace has "Woody Allen Syndrome" (we either love him or we hate him). While I love Woody Allen, I was unimpressed with David Foster Wallace. As a matter of fact, I also had "The Girl with the Curious Hair" in my reading stack, and after forcing myself to finish "Brief Interviews…", I donated them both to the reading rack at the train depot. There were a couple of stories that made me ponder, but on the whole, Wallace’s language was more a maze of pretension than anything resembling clarity, communication, or precision. He mostly includes stories without points alongside structured narratives where the prose is so muddy it turns reading into an act of mental gymnastics. When the two combine (muddy prose without point), the book is especially frustrating. I would not recommend this book. There are already more books available than can ever be read in a lifetime.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780316925198
Author:
Wallace, David Foster
Publisher:
Back Bay Books
Location:
Boston
Subject:
General
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Short stories
Subject:
Man-woman relationships
Subject:
Humorous fiction
Edition Description:
1st Back Bay paperback ed.
Series Volume:
92-24
Publication Date:
April 2000
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
336
Dimensions:
8.22x5.54x.90 in. .66 lbs.

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