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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 combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Product Identifiers

PublisherHachette Audio

ISBN-101600247377

ISBN-139781600247378

eBay Product ID (ePID)72991075

Product Key Features

Book TitleBrief Interviews with Hideous Men

TopicShort Stories (Single Author), General, Literary, Humorous / General

Publication Year2009

LanguageEnglish

GenreFiction

AuthorDavid Foster Wallace

FormatCompact Disc

Dimensions

Item Height1in

Item Length5.8in

Item Width5.2in

Item Weight5.1 Oz

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Reviews"A host of talented narrators and actors-including television actors John Krasinski and Christopher Meloni-deliver nuanced performances of the late Wallace's classic. But it's the author himself who steals the show: his gentle, almost dreamy voice unlocks the elaborate syntax and releases the immense feeling concealed by the comedy and labyrinthine sentences. While the various narrators ably capture the essence of the text, Wallace's renditions of such stories as "Forever Overhead" and "Death Is Not the End" are transcendent. Essential listening for Wallace fans and a fine introduction for newcomers."-- Publishers Weekly , Library Journal, 'His skills as a literary innovator are immense...this is an entertaining and dazzlingly innovative work...a dizzying gallop actoss the wild frontier of contemporary fiction.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Endlessly inventive' EVENING STANDARD'Exceptionally clever' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'As clever and intriguing as Wallace's past work' THE TIMES 'The most significant writer of his generation' TLS 'Wallace's talent is such that you can't help wondering: how good can he get?' TIME OUT 'Contains longish stretches of genius' INDEPENDENT'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight ... a superb comedian of culture' GUARDIAN 'A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent' NEW YORK TIMES 'David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives 'inventive', 'unique' and 'original' seem blase' T. Coraghessan Boyle 'Like Garrison Keillor on speed' NEW YORK OBSERVER'Very, very funny, and also deadly serious...a book of formidable creative intelligence.' OBSERVER'David Foster Wallace is every other writer's nightmare; not only is he depressingly young (34), superbly prolific (six books so far) and notably gifted (at least three major literary prizes to date), he's also good-looking and, so they say, charming. Now this Midwestern wunderkind has added to his ever-growing reputation by bringing out a short-story collection which, while it has its flaws (too intellectual in places, somewhat over-written in others), is still a few streets ahead of the competition in its versatility, panache and verbal ebullience.The varying length of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men indicate the range of Wallace's writing. Some, like the funny/dark "Death Is Not The End", about a gifted American writer (ha) lounging by his pool in suspended space-time, are no more than two pages long. Others are just paragraphs. By contrast, the title story is a 100-page-long suite of "conversations" with a series of repellent yet pitiable men given to lyrically reminiscing about "the sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she's had no liquor to drink". The pay-off is that this girl might have been raped and murdered by one of the "hideous men" in question., "A host of talented narrators and actors-including television actors John Krasinski and Christopher Meloni-deliver nuanced performances of the late Wallace's classic. But it's the author himself who steals the show: his gentle, almost dreamy voice unlocks the elaborate syntax and releases the immense feeling concealed by the comedy and labyrinthine sentences. While the various narrators ably capture the essence of the text, Wallace's renditions of such stories as "Forever Overhead" and "Death Is Not the End" are transcendent. Essential listening for Wallace fans and a fine introduction for newcomers.", "A host of talented narrators and actors-including television actors John Krasinski and Christopher Meloni-deliver nuanced performances of the late Wallace's classic. But it's the author himself who steals the show: his gentle, almost dreamy voice unlocks the elaborate syntax and releases the immense feeling concealed by the comedy and labyrinthine sentences. While the various narrators ably capture the essence of the text, Wallace's renditions of such stories as "Forever Overhead" and "Death Is Not the End" are transcendent. Essential listening for Wallace fans and a fine introduction for newcomers."'e" Publishers Weekly , Library Journal, His skills as a literary innovator are immense...this is an entertaining and dazzlingly innovative work...a dizzying gallop actoss the wild frontier of contemporary fiction., "Brilliant... bitingly funny...wildly imaginative." -Salon "Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest , Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works.... While the inauthenticity of male/female relations is a recurrent motif, the central theme is the nature of narrative itself, as in "Octet," where the author turns self-reflexiveness on itself, creating something that might be termed meta-meta-fiction. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here." -Library Journal "A supersonic delight, a full-scale harassment of the short story form.... David Foster Wallace is one badass fiction writer." -Benjamin Weissman, LA Weekly, "Brilliant... bitingly funny...wildly imaginative." -Salon "Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel,Infinite Jest, Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works.... While the inauthenticity of male/female relations is a recurrent motif, the central theme is the nature of narrative itself, as in "Octet," where the author turns self-reflexiveness on itself, creating something that might be termed meta-meta-fiction. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here." -Library Journal "A supersonic delight, a full-scale harassment of the short story form.... David Foster Wallace is one badass fiction writer." -Benjamin Weissman,LA Weekly

Dewey Edition21

Number of Volumes4 Vols.

Dewey Decimal813/.54

Edition DescriptionUnabridged Edition

Number of Pages1 Pages