Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

By: David Foster Wallace

Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Will Forte, Malcolm Goodwin, John Krasinski, Christopher Meloni, Chris Messina, Max Minghella, Dennis O'Hare

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Narrators include David Foster Wallace, John Krasinski, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Will Forte, Malcolm Goodwin, Christopher Meloni, Chris Messina, Max Minghella, Dennis O'Hare, Lou Taylor Pucci, Ben Shenkman, Joey Slotnick, and Cory Stoll.

©2009 David Foster Wallace (P)2009 Hachette

Critic reviews

"[T]hese stories, at their best, show an erotic savagery and intellectual depth that will confound, fascinate and disturb the most unsuspecting reader as well as devoted fans of this talented writer." ( Publishers Weekly)
"In this book he demonstrates his strengths as a stylist, humorist and thinker.... None of these stories is easy, but all display an intelligence and a swagger that make them hard to put down." ( The Wall Street Journal)
"Brilliant... bitingly funny...wildly imaginative." (Salon.com)

Typical Wallace

I am glad this was a fairly short read. It will probably not become my favorite DFW book but I am gad to have read it just to be a completist. He highlights many usually unnoticed details in these brief interviews with men you probably know but would not want to spend much time with if you REALLY knew them. Most of these men have a view of women that women would not be at all pleased about. This men are modern primitives. So listening to four hours of this material has not been all joy. But there have been moments of great insight as there always is in his books and essays. Great performances by the voice cast as well!

The Spectrum of Strangeness in the Interviews

I didn’t know what to expect from this book. My exposure to Wallace’s work was mostly limited to Reviews and Obituaries. The variety of the styles and characters in the interviews was interesting, some downright repulsive, others, quite bland. The last interview, with the raped woman, seemed the most revealing of the Writer’s own perspective. The others seemed figments of his imagination.

The final entry, while the briefest, was a dazzling display of Wallace’s renowned writing gifts and worth the price of admission to his World. The whole experience was worth Four Stars. ****

....and what if I said that happened to Me?

This interview is very much intended for people who've only ever picked up one or two books by David Foster Wallace, as I am in that same category.

It's a funny feeling - seeing a movie based on a book before actually reading the book. I definitely fall into the camp of movie goers that need to read the book before seeing the film, using my insider knowledge to compare and contrast the differences, seeing it as almost a guided insight into why the filmmakers made the choices that they did. And for the longest time I felt I was better off leaving my experience with this material at the movie theater.

I didn't bother with reading "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" because of everything I've heard of David Foster Wallace up until this point. Words like brilliant, introspective, and thought-provoking would get tossed around. Sure, it's all mounting evidence that points to the fact that I should be reading his stuff, but then other phrases like "not for everyone" and "you might not get it" would be added in for good measure. I'm not saying I hate to be challenged by a writer's material, but I'm going to need more to it's defense than "you just don't get IT". In these conversations, does anyone ever really know what IT is?

Happy to report, all my fears about tackling the deep introspection of David Foster Wallace's damaged characters was not an exercise in tedium. It was just the opposite.

I never intended on reading this book, even after my (apparently isolated) glowing reviewing of the John Krasinski movie of the same name. And then one day, randomly flipping through the dramatic fiction section on Audible, I came across the voice cast of the audiobook for "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". Bobby Cannavale, Will Forte, Malcolm Goodwin, John Krasinski, Christopher Meloni, Chris Messina, Max Minghella, and Dennis O'Hare, with additional narration from the book's author. It was almost too good not to listen.

But I did, and I'm glad for it. First off, the material, whose complexity scared me away for so long, was anything but egotistical or out of the realm of understanding. What we have here are a series of shorts (vintages in the film adaption) that all share a unifying theme of sex, attraction, lust, envy, and the idea of selfishness disguised so ingenuously as selflessness. Characters big and small, confident and inadequate, old and young - they all share with each other or with themselves what it takes to grow up, the make it in a relationship, what sex means to them, what it means to their partners.

David Foster Wallace mixes and mingles between a million different perspectives and is somehow able to capture the emotions and motivations so accurately that it's scary. He hops from one story that so deftly describes the mind of an adolescent, experiencing the piercing thrust into adult hood via a wet dream, before changing course in another story about a full grown man explaining, quite convincingly, why it's selfish to refuse blowjobs. It's no joke, he captures, in my limited experience on the subject, every facet on sexual relationships.

I kind of want to read the book just to see how much of my interest was gauged on performance (it feels more like an audio performance rather than an audiobook if that makes any sense) and how much on the material itself, although I'd be surprised if the written material alone didn't give me the same reaction I had while listening to the audiobook.

Not to mention all of the other books in David Foster Wallace's bibliography I plan to read.

Not my favorite DFW...

DFW's genius shows through even here and although this wasn't my favorite book of his that I've experienced, there was enough to get out of it to make this worth the listen.

actors help

I thought this was a great audiobook because of the dramatic readings. the performances really brought the story to the ears with added life.

Abridged ...Really an Audiobook of the Movie

Huge, staggeringly good cast (obviously, since it's the cast from the movie adaptation) & super strong, typically haunting readings from DFW, but really only covers the vignettes from the movie + "Forever Overhead," so it's only about 50% of the original book. Unfortunately doesn't include Adult World I & II, Octet, Signifying Nothing or the Depressed Person.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace. And John Krasinski, even. Nuf said.



My Audible app says that any significant review must contain twenty words. Jesus wept.

In progress - enjoying it, but narration style?

I've enjoyed many of these stories, but have found some of them unlistenable due to repeated utterings by the readers -- usually "cue" and sometimes "return to text." If I had the paper version in front of me, I might get a clue as to why, but right now it's annoying as hell.

Gem of Note: Interview 71 (the one referencing Bewitched)... hilarious.

Brief Audio with Hideous Editing

After the first two stories (dull sketches, read stiltedly) I almost gave up but there were enough plums in what was left that I was glad i stuck it out. He has a great ear for dialogue and for the little self-deceptions and manipulations that pepper his protagonists' dialogues. There are numerous readers and most of them are really good. This is the tragedy though: I read the review on amazon and some of the stories that didn't make the cut sound really interesting, so why did they get dropped in favour of what sounded like padding? Ach, I'll have to buy the papery version and read it myself I think.

Excellent

David Foster Wallace is an amazing writer, and this team of narrators does justice to his characters. I highly recommend reading or listening to this.