Hideous and Hilarious: David Foster Wallace

You already know from my post on Judy Budnitz that I love bizarre writing, and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a text which definitely fits this description. I recommend it to writers, avid readers and artists alike for the very enjoyable and freeing experience of encountering such weird but successful endeavours on the page.

It’s hard to know how best to describe this collection, because short stories doesn’t seem quite right. What you get in the 270-odd pages of the book is a series of brief interviews, as the title suggests, but these are punctuated with other small, quirky texts. In the interviews, the questions are absent, implicating the reader. Foster Wallace makes the text engaging like this in other ways, too, including the use of structural irony and regular irony. The results are both hilarious and disturbing. My personal favourites from the collection are ‘Forever Overhead’ and ‘B.I. #31 03-97’, but it is consistently excellent. Those who’ve read it, what were your favourites?

So, for something a little different that you can dip in and out of (making this a great choice for commuters) or read through in one hilariously messed-up sitting: this book is absolutely fantastic.