Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories

Having read -- and disliked -- two of this collection's pieces in Esquire and The New Yorker, I should have avoided Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. But I wanted to give David Foster Wallace and his vaunted dry humor one more chance. I found a couple of the briefest stories ("Forever Overhead," the first episode of the two-part "The Devil is a Busy Man") interesting and even laugh-provoking, but the remaining stories bored me. Like Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, this book strives too hard and self-consciously to be funny. Wallace should buy a volume or two of Barry Hannah's work and study the master of the dryly hilarious short story.

And no, the fact that Wallace committed suicide doesn't change my attitude about this collection.

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