SOURCE: Passaro, Vince. “A Baffling Man.” Salon.com (online magazine) (28 May 1999): http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/05/28/hideous man/print.html.

In the following review, Passaro maintains that Brief Interviews with Hideous Men “continues Wallace's record of presenting new turns, new valleys and imposing palisades in the landscape of American short fiction.”

A couple of years ago the young novelist, essayist and short story writer David Foster Wallace showed up on the “Charlie Rose” show. It was a delightfully painful television experience. The hook for the appearance was that Wallace's massive novel, Infinite Jest, had just been issued in paperback.

The publicity that surrounded Wallace and that difficult, brilliant, heavily promoted but little-read novel provides a good working example of the differences between the agent-editor-media matrix's vision of a serious writer and one who actually is serious. In the happy publicity vocabulary of Nice Cover Quotes and glossy...