SOURCE: Merritt, Stephanie. “The Good, The Bad. …” The Observer (28 January 2001).

In the following review, Merritt praises the humorous and insightful stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Long before Dave Eggers attracted critical attention for the tongue-in-cheek metafictional self-deconstructing style in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, David Foster Wallace (who generously gave Eggers a cover quote) had been honing that particular voice to perfection.

These stories [in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men] are difficult to categorise, roaming wilfully across the boundaries of genres and inventing new ones, a fact that Wallace appears to be self-mockingly acknowledging in ‘Octet’: ‘You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as “short stories” …’

The brief interviews of the...