| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780316925198 | | Publisher: Back Bay Books | | Publish Date: 4/1/2000 | | Buy.com Sku: 30566849 | | Item#: RHF2WJ | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 14212 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.5L x 1T | | Pages: 288 |
|
|
|
| | | David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In this exuberantly acclaimed collection he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
Annotation:
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.
| PraiseSalon
"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." - Vince Passaro 05/28/1999New York Times
"[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." - Michiko Kakutani 06/02/1999 Voice Literary Supplement
"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." - Alex Abramovich 06/09/1999 New York Times Book Review
"[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." - Adam Goodheart 06/20/1999 New York Review of Books
"[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." - A. O. Scott 02/10/2000 Times Literary Supplement
"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." - Lawrence Norfolk 01/14/2000 |
| Author Bio| David Foster Wallace | | David Foster Wallace was an American writer of prodigious talent, the literary descendent of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, and one of the postmodern writers--along with William T. Vollmann and Dave Eggers--who rose to prominence in the 1990s for their formal extravagance and keen interrogation of both literary and popular American culture. Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York but grew up in Champaign, Illinois, where he showed promise as a tennis player. After receiving a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace published a Pynchonesque novel (THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM) and a collection of short stories (GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR) that marked him as a literary stylist able to tackle a wide range of subjects with sardonic wit. Wallace is best known for his 1,079-page novel, INFINITE JEST (1996), a vicious satire about American culture that featured a father who committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave, and a film so entertaining it killed anyone who watched it. Shortly later Wallace received the MacArthur "genius grant." Later in his life he turned more to shorter work and essays on politics and cultural life. After battling depression for decades, Wallace hanged himself in his home in September 2008. |
| | Read A Chapter |
Chapter One
Death Is Not the End The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as 'the poet's poet' or sometimes simply 'the Poet,' lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home's pool, a Click to read more...
Chapter One
Death Is Not the End The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as 'the poet's poet' or sometimes simply 'the Poet,' lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home's pool, a poet who was among the first ten Americans to receive a 'Genius Grant' from the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5'8'', 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems—brand transplants, he sat, or lay—or perhaps most accurately just 'reclined'—in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home's kidney-shaped pool,1 on the pool's tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35° w/r/t the deck's mosaic tile, at 10:20 a.m. on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet in the history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade of the umbrella, reading Newsweek magazine,2 using the modest swell of his abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, also wearing thongs, one hand behind his head, the other hand out to the side and trailing on the dun-and-ochre filigree of the deck's expensive Spanish ceramic tile, occasionally wetting a finger to turn the page, wearing prescription sunglasses whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed, wearing on the trailing hand a wristwatch of middling quality and expense, simulated-rubber thongs on his feet, legs crossed at the ankle and knees slightly spread, the sky cloudless and brightening as the morning's sun moved up and right, wetting a finger not with saliva or perspiration but with the condensation on the slender frosted glass of iced tea that rested now just on the border of his body's shadow to the chair's upper left and would have to be moved to remain in that cool shadow, tracing a finger idly down the glass's side before bringing the moist finger idly up to the page, occasionally turning the pages of the 19 September 1994 edition of Newsweek magazine, reading about American health-care reform and about USAir's tragic Flight 427, reading a summary and favorable review of the popular nonfiction volumes Hot Zone and The Coming Plague, sometimes turning several pages in succession, skimming certain articles and summaries, an eminent American poet now four months short of his fifty-seventh birthday, a poet whom Newsweek magazine's chief competitor, Time, had once rather absurdly called 'the closest thing to a genuine literary immortal now living,' his shins nearly hairless, the open umbrella's elliptic shadow tightening slightly, the thongs' simulated rubber pebbled on both sides of the sole, the poet's forehead dotted with perspiration, his tan deep and rich, the insides of his upper legs nearly hairless, his penis curled tightly on itself inside the tight swimsuit, his Vandyke neatly trimmed, an ashtray on the iron table, not drinking his iced tea, occasionally clearing his throat, at intervals shifting slightly in the pastel deck chair to scratch idly at the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other foot without removing his thongs or looking at either foot, seemingly intent on the magazine, the blue pool to his right and the home's thick glass sliding rear door to his oblique left, between himself and the pool a round table of white woven iron impaled at the center by a large beach umbrella whose shadow now no longer touches the pool, an indisputably accomplished poet, reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home. The home's pool and deck area is surrounded on three sides by trees and shrubbery. The trees and shrubbery, installed years before, are densely interwoven and tangled and serve the same essential function as a redwood privacy fence or a wall of fine stone. It is the height of spring, and the trees and shrubbery are in full leaf and are intensely green and still, and are complexly shadowed, and the sky is wholly blue and still, so that the whole enclosed tableau of pool and deck and poet and chair and table and trees and home's rear façade is very still and composed and very nearly wholly silent, the soft gurgle of the pool's pump and drain and the occasional sound of the poet clearing his throat or turning the pages of Newsweek magazine the only sounds—not a bird, no distant lawn mowers or hedge trimmers or weed-eating devices, no jets overhead or distant muffled sounds from the pools of the homes on either side of the poet's home—nothing but the pool's respiration and poet's occasional cleared throat, wholly still and composed and enclosed, not even a hint of a breeze to stir the leaves of the trees and shrubbery, the silent living enclosing flora's motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion.3 * * * 1. Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature's distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature. 2. Never the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, however: thrice rejected early in his career, he had reason to believe that something personal and/or political was afoot with the Guggenheim Fellowship committee, and had decided that he'd simply be damned, starve utterly, before he would ever again hire a graduate assistant to fill out the tiresome triplicate Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship application and go through the tiresome contemptible farce of 'objective' consideration ever again. 3. That is not wholly true.
Continues...
Excerpted from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Copyright © 2000 by David Foster Wallace. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
|
|
|
