SOURCE: Potts, Robert. “They'll Do Anything to Get You into Bed.” The Observer (23 January 2000).

In the following positive assessment, Potts delineates the moral purpose of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, which a friend of mine nicknamed ‘Infinite Book’, weighed in at 981 pages, with a further 97 pages of footnotes. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is, well, briefer, being a collection of, short stories or, more accurately, as Wallace himself puts it, ‘not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as short stories (not even as those upscale microbrewed Flash Fictions that have become so popular in recent years—even though these belletristic pieces are really short, they just don't work like Flash Fictions are supposed to).’ That is the problem, or maybe the delight, of this book; there is almost nothing to say...