Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace had an extraordinary and unsettling gift for climbing inside the minds of people you would not want to spend time with and making you understand them anyway. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is structured, in part, as transcripts of interviews with men who are selfish, manipulative, damaged, and sometimes genuinely monstrous—and yet Wallace renders them with such precision and compassion that you finish the book feeling like you understand something about human weakness you did not before. Wallace believed that fiction's job was to make you feel less alone, and even in a book populated by hideous men, he somehow manages to do exactly that.

This collection serves as an ideal entry point into Wallace's world for those daunted by the scale of Infinite Jest, and pairs naturally with his essay collection Consider the Lobster, which applies the same penetrating intelligence to nonfiction.