Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9185 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 273 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Foster Wallace is every other writer's nightmare; not only is he depressingly young (34), superbly prolific (six books so far) and notably gifted (at least three major literary prizes to date), he's also good-looking and, so they say, charming. Now this Midwestern wunderkind has added to his ever-growing reputation by bringing out a short-story collection which, while it has its flaws (too intellectual in places, somewhat over-written in others), is still a few streets ahead of the competition in its versatility, panache and verbal ebullience.

The varying length of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men indicate the range of Wallace's writing. Some, like the funny/dark "Death Is Not The End", about a gifted American writer (ha) lounging by his pool in suspended space-time, are no more than two pages long. Others are just paragraphs. By contrast, the title story is a 100-page-long suite of "conversations" with a series of repellent yet pitiable men given to lyrically reminiscing about "the sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she's had no liquor to drink". The pay-off is that this girl might have been raped and murdered by one of the "hideous men" in question.

Wallace's prose-style is as various as the length, tone and subject matter. Sometime he's like Will Self in his wordy self-confidence. Other times he's as coarsely comedic as Irvine Welsh ("the rawness and tenderness and spanked pink head of his thingie"). Still other times, like in the deft and amusing parody of dictionary-speak, Datum Centurio, the only possible comparison is with a talkative James Joyce after two bottles of champagne. --Sean Thomas

Review
'Entertaining and dazzlingly innovative' Daily Telegraph 'Endlessly inventive' Evening Standard 'Exceptionally clever' Independent on Sunday 'As clever and intriguing as Wallace's past work' The Times 'The most significant writer of his generation' TLS 'Wallace's talent is such that you can't help wondering: how good can he get? Time Out 'Contains longish stretches of genius' Independent

NEW YORK TIMES
'A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent'

Customer Reviews

Nearly perfect
Following Jest was, to me,a nearly insurmountable task. However, DFW does a more than amazing job. The writing in this book is funny and perfectly serious all at once. Particularly the Brief Interviews sections-they had me laughing out loud and nearly resenting my laughter. if you've never read DFW before this is a good place to start. You get him in story-length dosages and this collection is, in fact, a good precursor to reading Jest, despite the fact that it was published years after.He really takes the modern concept of the story further than nearly anyone I've ever read. You'll enjoy this. Trust me.

Gosh!
Intelligent, cerebral and darkly comic; this book is all these things. David Foster Wallace's collection of shorts (some very short) will shock and amaze, but is for the commited only.

Wallace reaches almost Joycean levels of impenetrability from time to time, and is from the "hurts so much let's pretend it's funny" school of comedy. Although, I can't quite think of a moment while reading the book when I laughed, rather than just raising a wry eyebrow.

This is excellent stuff, and should be read - just don't expect to (makes reflexive air quote gesture) "enjoy" it in the traditional sense.

Deeply frightening and perversely funny
I cannot think of any other current writer more in touch with the spirit of the times than Wallace. He's most certainly of the cerebral type (equally adept at neurocognitive science and post-post-whatever literary theory), and the undisputed master of hard-tech US english. "Brief Interviews..." is merciless in its portrayal of the human condition - and it is sometimes difficult to discern whether your laughter is due to pure literary pleasure, or desperate self-defense in the face of a truth too nasty to bear. Wallace is basically tracking and describing the ongoing redistribution of the meaning of "being human", and anyone even remotely interested in which direction we are all headed should check out his books. At times brutal and bleak - but not without a certain tender regard for the fragile creatures lost in the information-saturated cultural wastelands of high modernity.