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| brief interviews with hideous men online: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace, 2009-09-24 In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person,' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World,' which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace, 2009-09-24 In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person,' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World,' which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality Edward Jackson, 2020-06-11 David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics is the first full-length study of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wallace's work – male sexuality. Departing from biographical accounts of Wallace's troubled relationship to sex, the book offers new and engaging close readings of this vexed topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Wallace consistently returns to images of sexual toxicity across his career to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are immutably hideous. He makes this argument by drawing on a variety of neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors, which in their appeal to apparently neutral economic processes and natural bodily facts, forestall the possibility that men can change. The book therefore provides a revisionist account of Wallace's attitudes towards capitalism, as well as a critical dissection of his approach to masculinity and sexuality. In doing so, David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality shows how Wallace can be considered a neoliberal writer, whose commitment to furthering male sexual toxicity is a disturbing but undeniable part of his literary project. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Conversations with David Foster Wallace Stephen Burn, 2012-03-08 Conversations with the author of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Infinite Jest |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The David Foster Wallace Reader David Foster Wallace, 2014-11-11 Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here — with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work — essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King, and legendary stories like The Depressed Person. Wallace's explorations of morality, self-consciousness, addiction, sports, love, and the many other subjects that occupied him are represented here in both fiction and nonfiction. Collected for the first time are Wallace's first published story, The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen In Relation to the Bad Thing and a selection of his work as a writing instructor, including reading lists, grammar guides, and general guidelines for his students. A dozen writers and critics, including Hari Kunzru, Anne Fadiman, and Nam Le, add afterwords to favorite pieces, expanding our appreciation of the unique pleasures of Wallace's writing. The result is an astonishing volume that shows the breadth and range of one of America's most daring and talented writers (Los Angeles Times Book Review) whose work was full of humor, insight, and beauty. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Creativity Market Dominique Hecq, 2012-04-05 This book focuses on creative writing both as a subject in universities around the world and beyond academia. It offers a thought-provoking analysis of creativity in the globalised marketplace, and examines the intersection of the university sector and the creative industries. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: #MeToo and Literary Studies Mary K. Holland, Heather Hewett, 2021-09-23 Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work Geoff Hamilton, Brian Jones, 2015-04-22 Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with the English-language fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Oblivion David Foster Wallace, 2004-06-08 In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: How to Write Fiction (And Think About It) Robert Graham, 2006-10-29 If you are a writer of fiction, this practical handbook will teach you how to acquire your own writer's tool-box. Here you will learn all about developing your craft. The wide-ranging exploration of fiction-writing skills contains many unique features, such as the focus on reflective learning and tuition on advanced skills including foreshadowing, transitions and producing short story cycles. Throughout, the approach is centred on 3 kinds of activity: - Examining the theory of particular fiction writing skills. - Analysing the practice of these skills in examples of published work. - Practising the use of skills in fiction-writing exercises. What makes this guide so distinctive, though, is the way it consistently asks you to reflect on your work, and stresses the importance of being able to articulate the processes of writing. Packed with wisdom about the art of fiction and filled with writing exercises, How to Write Fiction (and Think about It) examines the work of today's finest authors to teach you everything you need to know about writing short stories or longer fiction. Whether you are a student, a would-be professional author, or a general reader who simply likes to write for pleasure, this guide will equip you with a portfolio of key fiction-writing skills. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Moving Text Garrick V. Allen , Christopher R. Brewer, Dennis F. Kinlaw III , 2018-06-30 Drawing upon the pioneering work of the British theologian David Brown who argues for a non-static, ‘moving text’ that reaches beyond the biblical canon, this volume brings together twelve interdisciplinary essays, as well as a response from Brown. With essays ranging from New Testament textual criticism to the fiction of David Foster Wallace, The Moving Text provides an introduction to Brown and the Bible that will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as specialists in a wide range of fields. Contributions include: Ian Boxall (The Catholic University of America) From the Magi to Pilate's Wife: David Brown, Tradition and the Reception of Matthew's Text, Robert MacSwain (The University of the South) David Brown and Eleonore Stump on Biblical Interpretation, Aaron Rosen (Rocky Mountain College) Revisions of Sacrifice: Abraham in Art and Interfaith Dialogue, Dennis F. Kinlaw III (Houston Baptist University) The Forms of Faith in Contemporary American Fiction. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Stephen Burn, 2003-05-20 This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Fate, Time, and Language David Foster Wallace, 2011 Presents David Foster Wallace critiques philosopher Richard Taylor's work implying that humans have no control over the future and includes essays linking Wallace's critique with his later works of fiction. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature Casey Michael Henry, 2019-02-07 How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age? Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis's J R and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho through to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Through these histories, the book charts the ways in which print-based postmodern writing at first resisted new mass media forms and ultimately came to respond to them. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace Ralph Clare, 2018-09-20 Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media Werner Wolf, 2011-01-01 One possible description of the contemporary medial landscape in Western culture is that it has gone ‘meta’ to an unprecedented extent, so that a remarkable ‘meta-culture’ has emerged. Indeed, ‘metareference’, i.e. self-reflexive comments on, or references to, various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact or performance, specific media and arts or the media in general is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in ‘high’ art and literature as frequently as in their popular counterparts, in the traditional media as well as in new media. From the Simpsons, pop music, children’s literature, computer games and pornography to the contemporary visual arts, feature film, postmodern fiction, drama and even architecture – everywhere one can find metareferential explorations, comments on or criticism of representation, medial conventions or modes of production and reception, and related issues. Within individual media and genres, notably in research on postmodernist metafiction, this outspoken tendency towards ‘metaization’ is known well enough, and various reasons have been given for it. Yet never has there been an attempt to account for what one may aptly term the current ‘metareferential turn’ on a larger, transmedial scale. This is what The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation undertakes to do as a sequel to its predecessor, the volume Metareference across Media (vol. 4 in the series ‘Studies in Intermediality’), which was dedicated to theoretical issues and transhistorical case studies. Coming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors to the present volume propose explanations of impressive subtlety, breadth and depth for the current situation in addition to exploring individual forms and functions of metareference which may be linked with particular explanations. As expected, there is no monocausal reason to be found for the situation under scrutiny, yet the proposals made have in their compination a remarkable explanatory power which contributes to a better understanding of an important facet of current media production and reception. The essays assembled in the volume, which also contains an introduction with a detailed survey over the possibilities of accounting for the metareferential turn, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film and art history. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Joanna Klara Teske, 2024-09-30 Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which broadly understood contemporary fiction envisions, explores and engenders minds going beyond the classical models. The opening essay discusses the complex relationships between such innovative concepts of the mind and experimental techniques for presenting mentality. The chapters which follow focus on (dis)embodied and/or extended mind, virtuality of avatar minds, intermental thought of reader communities, the capability of artificial intelligence (and humans) for genuine selfless love, the interplay between technology and affect in posthuman consciousness. The books under discussion include Murmur by Will Eaves, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. A piece of conceptual fiction by Steve Tomasula, one of the most innovative American novelists of our times, exploring the human mind’s alleged power to transcend its biological limits, complements these scholarly inquiries. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture Lydia R. Cooper, 2021-12-26 Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from incels to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Global Wallace Lucas Thompson, 2016-12-01 David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories -- Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa -- the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Contemporary Fictions of Attention Alice Bennett, 2018-08-09 With the supposed shortening of our attention spans, what future is there for fiction in the age of the internet? Contemporary Fictions of Attention rejects this discourse of distraction-crisis which suggests that the future of reading is in peril, and instead finds that contemporary writers construct 'fictions of attention' that find some value in states or moments of inattention. Through discussion of work by a diverse selection of writers, including Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, this book identifies how fiction prompts readers to become peripherally aware of their own attention. Contemporary Fictions of Attention locates a common interest in attention within 21st-century fiction and connects this interest to a series of debates surrounding ethics, temporality, the everyday, boredom, work, and self-discipline in contemporary culture. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Lynch’s American Dreamscape Mike Miley, 2025-01-09 How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch's American Dreamscape broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch's work engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. As much as Lynch stands as a singular artistic voice, his work arises from and taps into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that illuminates not only his approach to creativity but also the way works interact with each other in an age of mass media. From children's literature to teen tragedy ballads, Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy to folk music and mixtapes, David Lynch's American Dreamscape investigates the cultural frequencies Lynch's films tune into and positions Lynch's work as a conduit for American popular culture, a medium or channel through which the subconscious of American life finds its way into full view. The book expands upon this approach by discussing how artists such as David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey graft Lynch's affiliative, cinematic sensibility onto their own projects. Reading their work as intertextual engagements with Lynch's films further illustrates the versatile interactions among creators and audiences to generate more works, readers, and readings. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: White Flights Jess Row, 2019-08-06 A bold, incisive look at race and reparative writing in American fiction, by the author of Your Face in Mine White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" Marshall Boswell, 2014-07-31 Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as the Long Thing. Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing. Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming encyclopedic novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and The Long Thing is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form David Hering, 2016-09-08 In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace, 1998 This exuberantly praised--and uproariously funny--first collection of nonfiction pieces by one of the most acclaimed and adventurous writers of our time--the author of Infinite Jest--reconfirms Mr. Wallace's stature as one of his generation's preeminent talents (New York Times). 368 pp. 5-city author tour. Print ads. 20,000 print. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Recognitions William Gaddis, 2012-02-07 The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the ur-text of postwar fiction and the first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Media, Technology and the Imagination Marie Hendry, Jennifer Page, 2013-08-19 The dynamic, precarious relationship between technology and imagination, or more broadly, between the sciences and the humanities, is a thrilling crux, offering possibilities scholars and artists of previous generations might have only hoped for in the most abstract way. No longer is technological advancement confined to the laboratory or to the pages of speculative fiction; it is an accepted, expected aspect of modern existence, including contemporary art, performance and literature. From the ways we communicate to the ways we create, technology has become a conduit as well as an inspiration for imaginative innovation. The advent and accessibility of new media, communication outlets and innovative software programs have democratized the creative landscape, building a community of professionals and amateurs who can freely discuss and shape the way literature, art and performance are created and perceived. Just as technology has been liberated from categorical confines, it has helped art and literature be realized as entities that occur in places besides galleries and libraries. Tablets and e-readers, for example, make it possible for literary enthusiasts to read books that are out of print, difficult to find or even self-published by amateur writers, which would have merely been a bibliophile’s dream as little as a decade ago. Correspondingly, the essays in this volume examine the intersection of technology and imaginative creation as it applies to and influences modern film, fiction, graphic novels and pedagogical practice. The contributors investigate how technology has indelibly changed the practice of literary and cultural analysis and even the most basic facets of contemporary society: communication, relation and creation. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace Ralph Clare, 2018-09-20 A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Jeeves And The Tie That Binds P.G. Wodehouse, 2000-11 Jeeves belongs to a club for butlers, and one of the rules is that every member must contribute to the club book everything about the fellow he's working for. Jeeves is so taken with his employer, Bertie Wooster, that he writes eighteen pages about him--and Bertie, quite naturally, is perturbed. Suppose the book falls into the wrong hands ... |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Wittgenstein's Mistress David Markson, 2023-11-14 Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state—obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness—so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.” |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace Stephen J. Burn, Mary K. Holland, 2019-08-01 David Foster Wallace's works engage with his literary moment--roughly summarized as postmodernism--and with the author's historical context. From his famously complex fiction to essays critical of American culture, Wallace's works have at their core essential human concerns such as self-understanding, connecting with others, ethical behavior, and finding meaning. The essays in this volume suggest ways to elucidate Wallace's philosophical and literary preoccupations for today's students, who continue to contend with urgent issues, both personal and political, through reading literature. Part 1, Materials, offers guidance on biographical, contextual, and archival sources and critical responses to Wallace's writing. The essays in part 2, Approaches, discuss teaching key works and genres in high school settings, first-year undergraduate writing classes, American literature surveys, seminars on Wallace, and world literature courses. They examine Wallace's social and philosophical contexts and contributions, treating topics such as gender, literary ethics, and the culture of writing programs. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: How to Write A Short Story (And Think About It) Robert Graham, 2017-09-16 Short story publishing is flourishing in the 21st century and is no longer seen as a poor relation of the novel. But what is a short story? And how do you write one? Robert Graham takes you through everything you need to know, from how a writer works to crafting and editing your own fiction. This heavily revised edition features new chapters by contemporary fiction writers. Stressing the importance of reading broadly and deeply, the book includes a wide range of prompts and writing exercises. It teaches you how to read as a writer and write like somebody who has read. You will learn the elements of craft you need to produce short stories, and one of the key writer's disciplines: reflecting on your own work. Whether you are a student or an experienced author, this book will teach you how to write short stories – and reflect on the creative processes involved. The book features chapters from writer-teachers James Friel, Rodge Glass, Ursula Hurley, Heather Leach, Helen Newall, Jenny Newman, James Rice and Tom Vowler. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: How Right You Are, Jeeves P.G. Wodehouse, 2000-11 English comedy with bumbling Bertie Wooster and his all knowing valet, Jeeves. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story D. T. Max, 2012-08-30 The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Language, Mind, and Power Daniel R. Boisvert, Ralf Thiede, 2020-05-31 Language is a natural resource: Power and vulnerability are associated with access to language, just as to food and water. In this new book, a linguist and philosopher elucidate why language is so powerful, illuminate its very real social and political implications, and make the case for linguistic equality—equality among languages and equality in access to/knowledge of language and its use—as a human right and tool to prevent violence and oppression. Students and instructors will find this accessible, interdisciplinary text invaluable for courses that explore how language reflects power structures in linguistics, philosophy/ethics, and cognitive science/psychology. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: What's Left of the World David J. Blacker, 2019-05-31 In 1960, Paul Goodman argued that the Fordist system that treated people as mere cogs in a machine had created a profound unhappiness in young people and in American society as a whole. More than half a century later, professor David Blacker recognizes that decades of neoliberalism have pushed young people beyond unhappiness and into a collective identity crisis. Overall, Americans no longer feel needed to do jobs that had previously anchored them in society and are becoming disconnected and purposeless. The proliferation of new identities, based not on work but on consumption, is symptomatic of neoliberalism and its hyper-commodification and deregulation of everyday life. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: Succeeding Postmodernism Mary K. Holland, 2013-04-25 While critics collect around the question of what comes after postmodernism, this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading antihumanist late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: McCain's Promise David Foster Wallace, 2008-06-01 Is John McCain For Real? That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest. And many young Americans were beginning to take notice. To get at something riveting and unspinnable and true about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: That Hideous Strength C.S. Lewis, 1996-10 Satirical fantasy featuring the interplanetary adventures of the fabulous Dr. Ransom. |
| brief interviews with hideous men online: David Foster Wallace and the Question of Scepticism Matt Prout, 2024-12-31 David Foster Wallace and the Question of Scepticism examines the role of scepticism and doubt in Wallace’s work, showing that they are of fundamental importance to his writing in its form and its themes. Wallace’s work articulates a deep ambivalence about the value of scepticism, on the one hand presenting practical and moral arguments for the value of conviction and belief, while on the other hand being committed to a sceptical project of opposing certainty and dogma. On a formal level, Wallace’s writing both solicits the reader’s trust and provokes the reader’s scepticism. This dynamic is responsible for the polarised responses of absolute trust and dissenting scepticism that characterise the work’s reception. By putting these responses into dialogue with the work’s internal treatment of the question of scepticism, this book illuminates the core philosophical investments that drive the work, and the dynamics that have so far governed its reception. |
BRIEF Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of BRIEF is short in duration, extent, or length. How to use brief in a sentence.
BRIEF | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
BRIEF definition: 1. lasting only a short time or containing few words: 2. used to express how quickly time goes…. Learn more.
Brief - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | Vocabulary.com
Something brief is short and to the point. If you make a brief visit, you don't stay long. If you make a brief statement, you use few words. If you wear brief shorts, you are showing a little too much …
Brief - definition of brief by The Free Dictionary
1. short in duration: a brief holiday. 2. short in length or extent; scanty: a brief bikini. 3. abrupt in manner; brusque: the professor was brief with me this morning. 4. terse or concise; containing …
brief adjective - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and ...
Definition of brief adjective in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
BRIEF definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
A brief speech or piece of writing does not contain too many words or details. In a brief statement, he concentrated entirely on international affairs. Write a very brief description of a typical problem.
Brief vs Breif – Which is Correct? - Two Minute English
Apr 14, 2025 · ‘Brief’ means short in duration or length. For example, if a meeting takes only ten minutes, you might say, “The meeting was brief.” Using ‘brief’ correctly in a sentence shows you …
BRIEF Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of BRIEF is short in duration, extent, or length. How to use brief in a sentence.
BRIEF | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
BRIEF definition: 1. lasting only a short time or containing few words: 2. used to express how quickly time goes…. Learn more.
Brief - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | Vocabulary.com
Something brief is short and to the point. If you make a brief visit, you don't stay long. If you make a brief statement, you use few words. If you wear brief shorts, you are showing a little too …
Brief - definition of brief by The Free Dictionary
1. short in duration: a brief holiday. 2. short in length or extent; scanty: a brief bikini. 3. abrupt in manner; brusque: the professor was brief with me this morning. 4. terse or concise; containing …
brief adjective - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and ...
Definition of brief adjective in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
BRIEF definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
A brief speech or piece of writing does not contain too many words or details. In a brief statement, he concentrated entirely on international affairs. Write a very brief description of a typical …
Brief vs Breif – Which is Correct? - Two Minute English
Apr 14, 2025 · ‘Brief’ means short in duration or length. For example, if a meeting takes only ten minutes, you might say, “The meeting was brief.” Using ‘brief’ correctly in a sentence shows …
