Brief Interviews With Hideous Men By David Foster Wallace

About The Book

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, written by David Foster Wallace, is a compilation of 23 short stories characterised by the author’s trademark dry humour. The 6th story in this compilation was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review in 1997. Though this piece of literature is termed as one containing short stories, the form of writing that the author follows hardly resembles the conventional form of a story. Breaking the mould, the author in these stories presents life through his myriad of thoughts.The first story, titled A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life, features all of two paragraphs which show the author’s ironic thoughts of life as it is in the postindustrial era. Octet, one of the other stories in this book, is a frantic, fragmentary piece of fiction consisting of four ‘pop quizzes’ unlike most stories you’ve ever read. The title story in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is essentially a series of monologues that have been presented in the form of clinical interviews. Neither the interviewee nor the interrogator are given identities in this story. No questions are given as well and the reader is left to ponder as to what the answers (given in the form of the monologues) actually mean.The men in some of his stories talk about sex in different ways: what they dream of doing, what they have done and how they put on a false facade, aspects such as these are elegantly covered in the book. The Devil Is a Busy Man, Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI), Signifying Nothing and Church Not Made with Hands are some of the short stories featured in this book. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was published by Abacus in 2001 and is available in the form of a paperback.

Review

His skills as a literary innovator are immense…this is an entertaining and dazzlingly innovative work…a dizzying gallop actoss the wild frontier of contemporary fiction. ― Daily Telegraph

Endlessly inventive ― Evening Standard

Exceptionally clever― INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

As clever and intriguing as Wallace's past work― The Times

His skills as a literary innovator are immense...this is an entertaining and dazzlingly innovative work...a dizzying gallop actoss the wild frontier of contemporary fiction. ― EVENING STANDARD

Endlessly inventive ― The Time

As clever and intriguing as Wallace's past work...these strong, sad voices ring powerfully clear― Time Out

About Author

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More. He died in 2008.