Fiction, American Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Name: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Author: David Foster Wallace
ISBN: 9780316925198

by David Foster Wallace

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Overview

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. The series of stories from which this exuberantly acclaimed book takes its title is a sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connections.

Synopsis

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

A brief excerpt from BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN:

A Radically Condensed History Of Postindustrial Life 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 man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Esquire - Greil Marcus

...[T]he result is definitively American and confident: Martin Amis with nothing to prove....[E]ven as you might focus on details of how the story has been put together...there's less and less sense of an author; the story seems to be running on its own power, as if not even its author could stop it.

About the Author, David Foster Wallace

Best known as the author of the audacious, shelf-bending postmodern masterpiece Infinite Jest, novelist, essayist, and short story writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century.

Reviews

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Editorials

Greil Marcus

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wallace, the young turk author whose ubernovel, Infinite Jest, was way too bulky for audio adaptation, throws himself gamely into the medium now, reading from his short fiction collection. In this audio debut, Wallace delivers his spry, satiric exercises in a sure-voiced, confident baritone. With the skill of a veteran narrator, he adeptly retains footing as he navigates his complex and wordy prose. His literary grab-bag trademarks include off-kilter descriptive passages, ponderous lists and footnotes, and a large portion of the tape is devoted to a one-sided interview with a psychotic sexual stalker. These odd tropes come across with humor, even tenderness, in Wallace's sensitive reading. He conveys the earnestness of a young, hardworking writer, eager to make his eccentric vision accessible through its spoken presentation. It's this sense of Wallace's strong desire to be appealing that will keep the listener with him throughout his sometimes difficult material. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A host of talented narrators and actors—including television actors John Krasinski and Christopher Meloni—deliver nuanced performances of the late Wallace's classic. But it's the author himself who steals the show: his gentle, almost dreamy voice unlocks the elaborate syntax and releases the immense feeling concealed by the comedy and labyrinthine sentences. While the various narrators ably capture the essence of the text, Wallace's renditions of such stories as “Forever Overhead” and “Death Is Not the End” are transcendent. Essential listening for Wallace fans and a fine introduction for newcomers. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Stories, character sketches, monologs, and conversations selected from the late Wallace's (www.davidfosterwallace.com) exquisitely written 1999 collection are here read by a cast including the author and 14 actors featured in John Krasinski's 2009 film adaptation of the work. Many of the characters, such as the cad who dumps a woman he has lured across the country, are despicable; others—e.g., a gang-rape survivor, a men's room attendant—are captured by hideous circumstances. Language and situations are sometimes graphic. The performances, including that by the author, are exceptional. Recommended for literary fiction and creative writing collections. ["Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here," read the review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 5/1/99.—Ed.]—Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC

Library Journal

Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest (LJ 1/96), Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works. Wallace's characters are psychological grotesques, emotionally detached and sometimes, as with the na ve young wife in "Adult World," finding an odd freedom in their distance. While the inauthenticity of male/female relations is a recurrent motif, the central theme is the nature of narrative itself, as in "Octet," where the author turns self-reflexiveness on itself, creating something that might be termed meta-meta-fiction. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here. For libraries where Infinite Jest was popular.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Greil Marcus

Michiko Kakutani

Almost all the people in this book are members of what might be called Inward Bound....[Examines] the ways in which men can take advantage of women...The New York Times

Adam Goodheart

David Foster Wallace often writes...in mad cadenzas of simian gibberish that break suddenly into glorious soliloquies, then plunge again into nonsense....[The collection of stories] seems possessed...by a vandalizing spirit....[I]n his wild hits and misses, his eccentric obsessions and his sinister experiments, he is beginning to resemble another mad scientist of American literature: Edgar Allan Poe.
— The New York Times Book Review

Greil Marcus

...[D]efinitively American and confident: Martin Amis with nothing to prove...It's a testament to Wallace's control of his material that even as you might focus on details of how the story has been put together—hoping that by doing so you could reduce its ugliness, its force—there's less and less sense of an author; the story see,s to be running on its own power, as if not even its author could stop it.
— Esquire

Adam Begley

Painful and often funny and very often hugely impressive and achieves, amazingly...piercing layers of irony, self-consciousness, fear, hostility, neurosis and plain old stupidity.
— The New York Observer

David Kronke

...[I]t seems as if Wallace's imagination has acccelerated to the point where meta-fiction is dull. He's trying to eliminate narrative altogether and flood his readers' minds with images or moods without establishing time or place or any kind of context...There's a lot of inspired noodling going on here; he still writes like a man afire with sentences that run the length of paragraphs...But there's a sameness and a clinical sterility to the writing here that's simply difficult to become absorbed in. It's easy to admire the writing but not much else.
— USA Today

Kirkus Reviews

A stimulating, if intermittently opaque, collection of discursive stories and even less fully fictionalized humorous pieces from the savvy-surrealistic author of Infinite Jest (1996), etc.