Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

In his startling and singular new short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. These stories venture inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange: a boy paralysed by fear atop a high diving board, a poet lounging contented beside his pool, a young couple experiencing sexual uncertainties. The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men at their most self-justifying, loquacious and benighted.

Wallace reaffirms his reputation as one of his generation’s pre-eminent talents, and once again expands our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford.