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    Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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    Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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    Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Audiobook4 hours

    Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

    Written by David Foster Wallace

    Narrated by John Krasinski, Christopher Meloni, Max Minghella and

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateSep 8, 2009
    ISBN9781600247385
    Unavailable
    Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Author

    David Foster Wallace

    David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) wrote the novels The Pale King, Infinite Jest, and The Broom of the System, as well as the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Everything and More, and This Is Water.

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    Reviews for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

    3.5/5

    768 ratings26 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book has some priceless oddities and interviews from many men who are willing to divulge all things fantastical that have to do with psychosexual but it also deals with women too and there are two incredibly long passages where the woman is the main character. In one, she is the 'the depressed person' and it is easy to get lost in the tediousness of this. In another, she is a hippie who is telling her story to a man who went in thinking just another one night stand. The story ends up being an incredibly intense account of her being picked up as a hitchhiker and being raped with the intention of murder thereafter. Another rather long one is the account of an old dying man who detests his own child. So, in some ways, interviews is sort of misleading...the interviews are interspersed with stories and pop quizzes regarding morality making this a hodge podge. Some of the stories are redundant and could have used some editing...some of the asides become overwhelming and take away from the main story. Otherwise, a very worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      Some of the writing in here affected me in ways I had never experienced before. It was at times mesmerisingly beautiful, profoundly challenging, funny, and deeply sad. At times it was also enormously frustrating (Infinite Jest was nothing like as difficult as some of these stories). Some stories fell flat. Much of the time, Wallace's rendering of first person voices, while undoubtedly technical masterful, just wasn't that much fun to read. This is a strange and complex collection. I think it's ghosts'll haunt me for some time.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to love this book. I wanted to love David Foster Wallace. I bought this book after I had a dream. I dreamt of a strong-jawed man with long hair and later, when I saw the tail end of the movie based on this book, I Googled "David Foster Wallace" and realized he was the man I had dreamed about. So because I am sort of daft, I felt this was a sign.It wasn't and I feel sort of odd that I didn't love this book from a literary icon.It had its moments. "The Depressed Person" for me was the best story in this collection. I think it was the best story for me because, as a completely depressed person who feels a particularly deep horror about testing people with the depths of my loathing self-involvement, it resonated a bit closely. Despite the fact that this story has a long, droning quality, it suited the sort of long, droning quality of persistent, intractable depression. "Octet" was too meta, too... something. It seemed too self-conscious, forcing me to engage with the writer when I just wanted to engage with the story. I felt like a meta-brick was thrown at my face as I read it.The first few stories with the hideous men flowed well. But then we got to the later interviews with hideous men and the droned on, piling on when brevity would have made the point even better. I got lost at times, wondering if the men were really hideous, if they were, in some sense, just lost because the narrative was lost, meandering. Take this sentence, for example: "The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it's the probity and thrift of the re-- to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity -- nor the irony that they blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission-slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution -- all the same."I fancy that I have enough intelligence that if I have to read a sentence more than three times then there is something going on that is deliberately distracting from clear meaning, that perhaps a clear meaning is not what is needed here and while I understand this style of writing in a manner that defies basic understanding appeals to people who find meaning in a disjointed narrative, I am not one of those people.It feels bad to want to love a book and not be able to do it.
    • 3/5
      This had a lot of what one expects when reading works by David Foster Wallace. It was complex, original, saturated, rambling, puzzling and overwhelming at times. Underlying all of those things is an air of genius. The man was a master at his craft, his writing is unlike anyone else's. The way he fills a sentence with such detail, is amazing. At times it almost feels as if the words are falling over themselves, trying to get out and be heard. Praise for the man and his writing style aside this book was great for me on some levels and terrible on others. I have to say much of this was rather dark, but then I guess that's what should be expected considering the title. Much of it is strange and more than a little twisted, he's definitely giving us a glimpse of the dark and depraved side of humanity. Most of the stories revolved around sex, relationships and depression. At times I was fascinated and thought he'd hit the nail on the head, really made me think about things, and exposed the subject matter in a profound new light. At other times I was just completely put off and though what kind of mind thinks these things, let alone writes them. Some of the vulgarity and shock seemed unnecessary, but in the end it all adds to the over all work. This is definitely not as good as Jest, and I think in part it's because we are dealing with short stories or glimpses, as he calls them. I think DFWs work needs to breathe and be spread out a bit more in order to really work. A great if perplexing read, but definitely not light reading.
    • 1/5
      Hated this book, didn't read past the first 20 pages. I think you would have to be a real literary genius to appreaciate and enjoy this form of literature. I'm a well educated woman who enjoys reading and I just did not get it. It didn't flow, didn't make sense, and you spend more time analyzing what the author is getting at or what he's trying to convey more than just enjoying it.
    • 3/5
      I read this because I enjoyed the stories in Oblivion so much, but I'm sorry to say I didn't think nearly as much of this collection. So many of the main characters -- especially in the longer stories -- are whiney and self-obsessed, and obsessed with their self-obsession, and whinily apologetic about their whineyness, that it's hard to spend so much time with them. I didn't actually find much that I would call "postmodern" about this work. There's a level of playfulness in the text, but then the content undercuts it with so much self-seriousness. Some of the shorter stories, or the "brief interviews" of the title, were more interesting.
    • 2/5
      A not terribly successful experiment at postmodern ficton. There are really not stories being told in some cases, and even those that qualify are basically narration describing action or thought. I thought it was disappointing overall, although 'The Depressed Person' might allow the reader to speculate how Wallace's own depression might have informed the story. I found the 'Hideous Men' sections tedious.I enjoyed 'Infinite Jest' and Wallace's essays, so I was rather surprised that this one fell flat with me.
    • 3/5
      This was the first book I've read from David Foster Wallace. I had purchased it over a year ago and unfortunately, didn't get to reading it until I was reminded I had it upon reading of his death. Overall, I can understand why he was considered a writer to watch. But, perhaps based on his suicide, I had a bias reading these stories. Especially the one specifically dealing with suicide. I began to wonder if his writing at least in this particular instance wasn't so much a creative fiction as something that he was mentally trying to unburden himself with.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful collection of short stories, and quite subtle. Contains the only story I have ever read whose point is actually to bore the reader :-)
    • 3/5
      Aside from two entries in this collection (a moving short story entitled "Forever Overhead" and the scathing treatise on the stupidity of the post-modern movement entitled "Octet"), Wallace's second offering of short stories leaves a lot to be desired.Not unreadable by any means, but not as fun or well-written as Wallace's work tends to be. In most instances, this work just comes off as self-indulgent.
    • 4/5
      Its easier than Oblivion. Very light hearted at times, very dark at others. Still not as good as his non-fiction but definitely his best short fiction I’ve read so far
    • 2/5
      Like most books with collections of stories, these are very uneven in terms of quality. The title stories are quite good, and I would also recommend the movie.
    • 1/5
      So bored. This book is not what I thought it was. Wish I could have my $8.99 back.
    • 3/5
      It is hard to consider this collection of "interviews" without considering the author's subsequent suicide. Each of the stories concerns a very educated very conflicted man generally dealing with his relationships with a woman or women in general. The voice throughout is colloquial and often powerful, but the overall tone unsettling and somehow unfinished. Violence simmers beneath the words. These are men's darkest feelings at work. The final story, for example, is about a narrator who picks up a "granola" woman at a concert of lesbian folks singers and brings her home solely for sex. He is surprised when, during their post-coital discussion, she relates a story about being abducted and raped by a psychopath while hitchhiking. His surprise is not so much how she eluded being murdered by her rapist as by his own reaction to the story, which is to fall in love with her and at the same time to simmer with rage when describing the incident to an unnamed woman. The disgust with himself is palpable, but so is the defensiveness and the resentment. A powerful collection that is at times difficult to read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      After finishing the mammoth "Infinite Jest" I thought I would try reading (listening) to some of David Foster Wallace's short stories. While not a bad collection, it certainly wasn't my cup of tea either. Some of the short stories I really got into, the first one being my favorite, but as I continued listening, some of the stories lost their luster. They were all beautifully written, but some of the plots and characters I could not get into. It happens! Even though I didn't love this short story collection about "hideous men" I am still a huge fan of David Foster Wallace's work and prose and it won't deter me from reading more of his stuff.
    • 4/5
      A great book full of psychotic men that reveals a truth that is terrorizing.
    • 4/5
      Did you know David Foster Wallace wrote about you? He wrote about me, too. Don't worry, I didn't know it either. But he wrote about me all through this book. The parts of myself that I hide, the features I don't want. Even some things that aren't about me but I fear others think might be. Sometimes it was too much, too revealing. Other times it was refreshing, comforting... Perhaps even a relief. Go ahead, find some relief in this book. You'll find yourself somewhere in it. Examine your flaws and maybe you can learn to be okay with them.
    • 3/5
      Some of the 23 stories in Wallace's bold, uneven, bitterly satirical second collection seem bound for best-of-the-year anthologies; a few others will leave even devoted Wallace fans befuddled. The rest of the stories fall between perplexing and brilliant, but what is most striking about this volume as a whole are the gloomy moral obsessions at the heart of Wallace's new work. Like his recent essays, these stories (many of which have been serialized in Harper's, Esquire and the Paris Review) are largely an attack on the sexual heroics of mainstream postwar fiction, an almost religious attempt to rescue (when not exposing as a fraud) the idea of romantic love. In the "interviews," that make up the title story, one man after another--speaking to a woman whose voice we never hear--reveals the pathetic creepiness of his romantic conquests and fantasies. These hideous men aren't the collection's only monsters of isolation. In "Adult World," Wallace writes of a young wife obsessed with fears that her husband is secretly, compulsively masturbating; in "The Depressed Person," one of Wallace's (rare) female narcissists whines that she is a "solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum"--this, to a dying friend. Yet these stories, at their best, show an erotic savagery and intellectual depth that will confound, fascinate and disturb the most unsuspecting reader as well as devoted fans of this talented writer. The review states it all. It is a moving book overall and Wallace wit and love of language is on display. The message and impact of the understandable stories are immense, provoking further introspection and thought. A portion of the stories are impenetrable, their purpose and direction completely unknown. Maybe hardcore fans would be better equipped to analyze the book as a whole. It was enjoyed and lamented, alternating with my ability to grasp the individual stories direction. It is uneven at times but unlike anything else out there that suffers from that descriptor, enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Excellent in parts, with the interviews, footnotes and predictions of future techno-sexuality borrowing heavily from Infinite Jest. The more experimental passages were just too much for me - but when he's in full flow, Foster Wallace is peerless.
    • 3/5
      With one exception, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" aren't really interviews at all. More like depositions, or in some cases, one-sided conversations as if observing someone talking on the phone; it is never the less a hallmark DFW book, meaning lots of literary voyeurism. Sometimes we get in depth stories about how characters feel -- mostly about relationships, or attempted relationships. Some of these hideous men have serious, physical handicaps that can make realization of their dreams difficult at best. Some of these are funny, some are disturbing, and some are downright uncomfortably hostile. The unfortunate guy with a "flipper" for an arm was amusing in a pathetic sort of way, while the long story about another guy's sexual acquaintance getting raped by a psychopath was very much on the disturbing end.David Foster Wallace was a master at making mundane people interesting, finding a story where most would find none. This book is a lot of little such stories. It is inconsistent, however; some worked, many did not. The array of readers on the audiobook is almost worth the effort of listening.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The more I read of David Foster Wallace's output the more it seems like his short stories exist as a playground for him to show off. Their are plenty of textual tricks on show in this collection and while that's admirable it's also alienating. Wallace talked up the idea of a "new sincerity" but these stories fly in the face of such words. The stylistic pyrotechnics are bold and smart and for that DFW is to be applauded; that doesn't make them stories that are easy to become emotionally invested in and that is my problem with this collection. There are probably only two stories in the book that I like and it's no coincidence that they are among the very shortest in the collection. Even a potentially very poignant and personal story like The Depressed Person is so overwritten that it becomes tedious and funny in ways that I'm not sure it's supposed to.In his novels DFW's desire to make a scene of his smarts is either reigned in by his editor or feels less invasive amidst the surrounding text. Likewise, one suspects his non-fiction is extremely readable because either Wallace or the magazine editor employing him deliberately craft his pieces in order to appeal to a relatively wide audience. Oblivion, which I haven't read yet, looks an interesting case - with its lack of footnotes (from what I've seen flicking through it) it perhaps indicates a more mature short story style from DFW, where he feels less of a need to display his bag of tricks. Wallace's early short story collections really aren't the place to see the best of him.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Beautiful. Important. Perhaps necessary. But above all - painful.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      You don't read much like this - every story is an experiment in style and overflowing with brilliantly marshalled ideas. It doesn't always work - one story, written in Clockwork Orange-esque language didn't work for me at all - but most of the time it does and it is always challenging and surprising, and often very funny. One story in particular, 'The Depressed Person', goes straight into my personal list of favourite short stories.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I have rarely, if ever, encountered a writer who demonstrates such creative, brilliant use of language as David Foster Wallace! He ranks with Nabokov in my opinion! This is not so much a collection of stories as a collection of notions, ideas, and vignettes. Difficult to read, because the reader must read every word and take time to savor it. No skimming allowed here!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Read this. Now. And if you can't read it, listen to it as an audio book. That's what I did (read by the man himself). Unbelievable. If you go the audio book route - you may just end up sitting in your parked car for 45 minutes unable to tear yourself away before the story's over.
    • 3/5
      I just finished reading Breif Interviews With Hideous Men. This book is some kind of a literary masterpiece yeah. I just didn’t enjoy reading it that much. I understand what this book is supposed to be, and it’s very eye-opening to note what he is doing/trying to do/succeeding to do in any one of these stories, but it is simply not enjoyable to read. It is rather like– as a child does in one of the earlier stories in this book, the only story I enjoyed– finding yourself forced to leap off of a high-dive. Post-leap, there are several different ways to consider yourself as having grown somehow, but during the dive it is not at all entertaining. You may find yourself feeling harassed, terrified, bored, or any other of a number of unpleasant emotions, and when you are finished you will cry GOD I AM GLAD THAT IS OVER and you will go on living some kind of expanded life and cease to think much about said high-dive UNLESS you are one of those people who find themselves compelled constantly to do unpleasant things and therefore suddenly find yourself compelled, through this unpleasant childhood experience most other people are busy forgetting, to become a world-class high-dive leaper. The big thing is this: yes, it is clever to be all sorts of postmodern, and yes, those who can pull it off well are all geniuses and deserve much praise– and DFW can pull it off well, frequently– but this is still not the kind of thing that books were invented for. They’re not enjoyable as short stories. I don’t care if they are a ‘delight’ and a ‘harassment of the short story form’. I am not going to want to read short stories if the writer of the short stories wrote them in order to harass me. In the same way, though I would credit laudable creativity to an artist whose form of sculpture involved filling a room with knives, I would not particularly enjoy being in that room, and would instead feel a degree of tension of be a little bit upset.The only one of these stories I actually enjoyed was ‘Forever Overhead,’ a brilliant piece about a boy on a high-dive. I think it is stunning. Other sections– the first of the ‘Hideous Men’ sections, for instance, or ‘Church Not Made With Hands’, a story about a young family in a tragic situation– are wonderful also, but are, in the case of the first, not as easy to enjoy, or, in the case of the second, so buried into the abrasive unpleasantness of the rest of this excellently-written book that by the time the reader gets to it he or she is simply too mentally exhausted to even recognize that this story is well-done and pleasant instead of abrasive. Putting the book down does not help– remembering prior sections can so trouble or bore that reading onward simply becomes as unpleasant as they were, regardless of whether or not the bit you are actually reading is itself unpleasant. The writing gets to be its least-bearable when he starts to write totally ironically about how stupid it is to always be totally ironic. I don’t know if it’s possible to sarcastically criticise sarcasm without sounding like a jerk, even if you ARE DFW. The fact is this: when DFW wants to make you experience, as in ‘The Depressed Person,’ what it is like to enter the mind of a severely depressed person, he does it in such a way and with such accuracy and force that there is practically no room for the reader to reflect. That’s how genuine it gets. It is the same, though less so, with the bit about an honored playwright’s father who, on his death bed, insists on going on and on a bout how much he hates his talented son. DFW simply presents these relentless neverending trauma-filled paragraphs one after another as if he is pounding the reader’s head with a bloody brick, and the reader must shout ‘God, this is spectacular, DFW! Now please get the brick out of my eye!’ The question we should all be asking is NOT ‘Is this good?‘ The question should be, ‘Am I having a good time reading this?‘ It is a totally inescapable fact that wholly unpleasant things are rarely saved for posterity. Even upsetting or pathologically-focused books, like Crime and Punishment, are saved because there is something accessible or somehow pleasant about the reading experience that makes at least some of us refrain from hurling it out of a window. There is barely any such redeeming factor here.So. DFW is some kind of literary god. But it is now perfectly self-evident to me why more writers are not running around trying to be as horrifically postmodern as he was. It is soul-crushingly unhappy to be so postmodern. I do not mean to be crass, but these stories make it clear that DFW understands human agony and disgrace and depression. And he killed himself. So, I say this: it is okay not to like this book. Read it and perhpas admire it, but it is okay to dislike it. The reason you dislike it so much is that you have understood what DFW was trying to do. And the thing he was trying to do was not to write an accessible, edifying book, but to conduct ‘a harassment of the short story form,’ which is the opposite of what short stories are for. One does not go around trying to become a successful baker by baking breads which are a harassment of the mouth. There is a reason for this.