Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
1999 short story collection by David Foster Wallace
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a short story collection by American writer David Foster Wallace, first published in 1999 by Little, Brown. According to the papers in the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, the book had an estimated gross sales of 28,000 hardcover copies during the first year of its publication.
Contents
The collection includes the following stories:
A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life
Death Is Not the End
Forever Overhead
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)
The Depressed Person
The Devil Is a Busy Man
Think
Signifying Nothing
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Datum Centurio
Octet
Adult World (I)
Adult World (II)
The Devil Is a Busy Man
Church Not Made with Hands
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko
On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon
Suicide as a Sort of Present
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)
Themes and analysis
The 23 metafictional pieces in the collection are "difficult to categorise, roaming wilfully across the boundaries of genres and inventing new ones", which one story ("Octet") appears to "self-mockingly acknowledge".
Four of the stories are titled "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and consist of numbered sections of varying length presented as transcripts of interviews with male subjects. The interviewer's questions are omitted from the transcripts, rendered merely as "Q". The collection is characterized by dark humor, alienation and irony.
As its title suggests, the book critiques aspects of modern masculinity and male chauvinism. "The 'hideous men' in Wallace's short stories are monstrous, parodic versions of Updikean characters, scrutinized with the eye of a pathologist ... Their sin is an implacable, and peculiarly American, strain of egoism."
In light of revelations regarding Wallace's abusive behavior toward Mary Karr, some scholars have questioned the motives of Wallace's stories, particularly in the collection which prominently featured misogynistic male characters. Amy Hungerford, a professor of English at Yale University, most notably in her book Making Literature Now, posed the same question for the collection and whether we can separate the art from the artist.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3644406. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999.
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