Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Description

In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence.
Wallace s stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. 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 agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women.
Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers.David Foster Wallace is one of those either-love-him-or-hate-him kind of writers, but most of the subjects in his collection are--as the title suggests--worthy of contempt. On this audiocassette, DFW, as he s known to his fans, reads a selection of his works from the book of the same name. The fictional "interviews" are brief forays into the minds of men via questions that are signaled with a verbal "Q," but never actually asked. While he reads those pieces in the voices of the interviewees, Wallace reads the rest of the collection--a handful of short stories--with the self-conscious lack of emotion commonly used by poets. Don t look for plot or action here; it s strictly character sketches with a good dose of verbal gymnastics. And don t expect to like most of the characters; it s clear the author doesn t either. (Running time: 3 hours, 2 cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs