SOURCE: LeClair, Tom. “The Non-Silence of the Un-Lamblike.” The Nation 269, no. 3 (19 July 1999): 31-4.

In the following mixed review, LeClair finds the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as “frequently inventive, often witty and always demanding.”

After the success of Infinite Jest in 1996, David Foster Wallace took a vacation from fiction and, perhaps, from fans' expectations with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He reported—a trip to the Caribbean on a cruise ship, to the Illinois State Fair, a David Lynch set, a Canadian tennis tournament—and he reviewed: his childhood tennis career, a book of literary theory and novels by his contemporaries. In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace scolded young writers of “Image Fiction,” who copy television's will to entertain, who relentlessly attempt “to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read.” He called for “new...