Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Author(s): David Foster Wallace
In his startling and singular short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person', a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World', which reveals a woman's agonised 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. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many different guises. Thought-provoking and playful, this collection confirms David Foster Wallace as one of the most imaginative young writers around. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the ironic, the surprising and the illuminating from every situation. His new collection will delight his growing number of fans, and provide a perfect introduction for new readers.
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'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 '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 'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight ... a superb comedian of culture' GUARDIAN 'A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent' NEW YORK TIMES 'David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives 'inventive', 'unique' and 'original' seem blase' T. Coraghessan Boyle 'Like Garrison Keillor on speed' NEW YORK OBSERVER 'Very, very funny, and also deadly serious...a book of formidable creative intelligence.' OBSERVER '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.
General Fields
- :
- : Little, Brown & Company
- : Hachette Audio
- : 0.141
- : 05 November 2009
- : 142mm X 124mm X 21mm
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : 1
- : CD-Audio
- : David Foster Wallace
