Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a short story collection by the late 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. 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.