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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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About the Author

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 201

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Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest (LJ 1/96), Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works. Wallace's characters are psychological grotesques, emotionally detached and sometimes, as with the na‹ve young wife in "Adult World," finding an odd freedom in their distance. 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. For libraries where Infinite Jest was popular.ÄLawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Wallace, the young turk author whose ubernovel, Infinite Jest, was way too bulky for audio adaptation, throws himself gamely into the medium now, reading from his short fiction collection. In this audio debut, Wallace delivers his spry, satiric exercises in a sure-voiced, confident baritone. With the skill of a veteran narrator, he adeptly retains footing as he navigates his complex and wordy prose. His literary grab-bag trademarks include off-kilter descriptive passages, ponderous lists and footnotes, and a large portion of the tape is devoted to a one-sided interview with a psychotic sexual stalker. These odd tropes come across with humor, even tenderness, in Wallace's sensitive reading. He conveys the earnestness of a young, hardworking writer, eager to make his eccentric vision accessible through its spoken presentation. It's this sense of Wallace's strong desire to be appealing that will keep the listener with him throughout his sometimes difficult material. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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