"David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In the pages of his novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the collections Girl with Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, he has created as unique a voice and view as any writer at work today, rendering a dazzling array of interior states with delicious insight and humor. In this new collection, the author extends his range and craft in twenty-two stories that intertwine hilarity with an escalating disquiet to create almost unbearable tensions. These stories venture inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange: a boy paralyzed by fear atop a high diving board ("Forever Overhead"), a poet lounging contented beside his pool ("Death Is Not the End"), a young couple experiencing sexual uncertainties ("Adult World"), a depressed woman soliciting comfort from her threadbare support network ("The Depressed
Person," chosen for the 1999 Henry Award Stories). The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connection. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men gives us men and women, celebrity and bitter loneliness, sexual posturing and naked honesty, erudition and apeman babble-abn world whose emotional complexity and outright comedy closely resemble our own. In these remarkable stories, David Foster Wallace reaffirms his reputation as a "passionate and deeply serious writer" (San Francisco Chronicle) who again expands our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford."