SOURCE: Orozco, Daniel. “Fast-Forward Fiction.” San Francisco Chronicle (16 May 1999..

In the following review, Orozco calls Wallace a literary show-off, concluding that the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men both dazzle and frustrate the reader.

Show-offs display proudly. Show-offs seek our attention and favor through, say, brilliant moves on the tennis court or awesome solo riffs on the guitar.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. If the show-off is very good, we take pleasure in the display. But our pleasure is sometimes an uneasy amalgam of “That's incredible!” and “Enough already!”

So it goes with Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a new story collection by David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) that both dazzles and frustrates. There are 23 stories here, displaying a wide range of narrative forms, from the semi-conventional prose story to stories only one paragraph long, from story...