Synopsis
This book alternates interviews--in which only the interviewee's voice is heard--with formally innovative short stories and pseudo-essays. Dwelling on sex, obsession, and adolescence, Wallace charts paths through an etymological dictionary and the mind of a boy on a high-dive with equal enthusiasm. This book was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1999.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2000-04-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 321 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
Twentytwo stories tell of a frightened boy frozen on a diving board, a depressed woman trying to find help, and a group of men who try to rationalize their relationships with women.
Industry Reviews
"Wallace, among his other talents, blends the languages of modern philosophy, sexual angst and suburban psychological breakdown in a way that manages both to be thoroughly new in literary terms, and yet still evoke in the reader that state of mind that all great literature evokes, that sense of encounter with phenomena long familiar and suddenly, perfectly identified."
Salon - Vince Passaro (05/28/1999)
"[T]his entire volume represents a sharp falling off in ambition, nuance and vision from Wallace's previous works of fiction, books like INFINITE JEST and THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM. Only one story in this volume--a sad, little elliptical tale titled "Church Not Made With Hands," which depicts a man trying to cope with his daughter's injury in a freak swimming pool accident--evinces the lure and dazzle of his earlier work and hints at the capabilities of this immensely talented writer."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (06/02/1999)
"Wallace has always been a carefree, funny writer, but his cleverness can be a curse. In BRIEF INTERVIEWS, words wound and the humor, scaled back, bares its teeth....There is such hatred in this book that midway through it seems that Wallace's confidence as a writer masks a collapse in the man, that he's given in to his own fears, folding fiction's layers into a blanket and hiding underneath. But Wallace breaks through this mounting rage to reach a more generous emotional world....Wallace has started to fight toward transcendence....[T]his book is finally a call to action, in life and fiction both....This is a tormented, heroic book."
Voice Literary Supplement - Alex Abramovich (06/09/1999)
"[I]n his wild hits and misses, his eccentric obsessions and his sinister experiments, [Wallace] is beginning to resemble another mad scientist of American literature: Edgar Allen Poe. And his hideous men, like Poe's are vexed by demons that haunt us all."
New York Times Book Review - Adam Goodheart (06/20/1999)
"The perverse choices Wallace makes are disturbing and serious. He treats subject matter normally considered unfit for fiction....Yet if one accepts that the proper remit of contemporary American fiction is to deal with America as it is, and the habits of mind which make it so, then Wallace...is the most significant writer of his generation....The stories in BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN....operate at the limit of the range of the short story and under self-imposed conditions of the utmost stringency. The unmediated terrain they seek is very distant from US fiction's current habitual haunts: some of these stories never find it and others never make it back. Those that do bring news of a rare and real America."
Times Literary Supplement - Lawrence Norfolk (01/14/2000)
"[W]hat is most striking about the interview subjects, and what they ultimately have in common, is their slippery, narcissistic ordinariness....The interviews hold up to hilarious, disturbing scrutiny the endlessly inventive duplicity that animates men's single-minded pursuit of sex. Acknowledging what louts they are becomes another weapon in the arsenal of loutishness."
New York Review of Books - A. O. Scott (02/10/2000)
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