Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

What Hacker News says

1. mplanchardAug 2019
   For the GP, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a great collection of short stories and a nice way to get introduced to Wallace without having to go whole hog into something like Infinite Jest.

   That being said, I also very much enjoyed his first novel, The Broom of the System. It’s an easier read than Infinite Jest. I don’t think it’s as good as IJ, but it’s definitely got a lower barrier to entry.

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2. roymurdockDec 2015
   "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" is also a great starting point if you want to get a sense of his darkly humorous fiction. Although, he embellishes and invents so many things in his non-fiction pieces that they straddle the line pretty nicely as well.
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3. steve-benjaminsOct 2014
   I really, really love David Foster Wallace and I've also never gotten through Infinite Jest.

   If anyone is interested in reading DWF I'd recommend checking out his shorter fiction (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) or non-fiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing) if Infinite Jest (rightfully) seems intimidating :)

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4. mbrockApr 2010
   Wait, wait, what? This thread ... huh?

   It's weird to see someone you think of as writing in a genre that kind of combines Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov with an almost fanatic pleading for empathy and communion -- described as someone who writes puzzles and brain teasers!

   He wrote great stuff about addiction, entertainment, alienation, human communication, depression; stuff that to at least one withdrawn academic prone to sadness and anxiety was enormously powerful and redemptive and transformative.

   He was a cerebral guy, he studied formal logic and math; that doesn't make him nonhuman! Is language not a valid, "people" thing to write about? People do have "trouble communicating," people are affected by the culture of television, even "postmodernism" and "irony" and "solipsism" are relevant in a deep, basic human sense for lots of (confused, lost) people.

   (Granted, his nonfiction pieces are what I like best -- every essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing is gold -- still, Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Infinite Jest are powerful books, though sometimes tragic on many levels.)

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5. 3n4nDec 2025
   I already forgot what I read for my work (MS in CS), so I'll stick with fiction.

   This year was slow for me reading-wise. Not a whole lot:

   - The Blind Owl / Sadegh Hedayat - Prince of Annwn (Mabinogion Tetralogy #1) - Norse Mythology / Gaiman: read it before accusations came out - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David F Wallace - A Connecticut Yankee ... / Mark Twain (not yet finished)

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6. monadic2Jul 2020
   While there’s a grain of truth to this, you’re neglecting the simultaneous experience of self consciousness of this at the same time. I believe there’s a David Foster Wallace short story about this somewhere in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
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