Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a short story collection by the late American writer David Foster Wallace, first published in 1999 by Little, Brown. According to the papers in the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, the book had an estimated gross sales of 28,000 hardcover copies during the first year of its publication. Themes and analysis The 23 metafictional pieces in the collection are "difficult to categorise, roaming wilfully across the boundaries of genres and inventing new ones", which one story ("Octet") appears to "self-mockingly acknowledge". Four of the stories are titled "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and consist of numbered sections of varying length presented as transcripts of interviews with male subjects. The interviewer's questions are omitted from the transcripts, rendered merely as "Q". The collection is characterized by dark humor, alienation and irony. As its title suggests, the book critiques aspects of modern masculinity and male chauvinism. "The 'hideous men' in Wallace's short stories are monstrous, parodic versions of Updikean characters, scrutinized with the eye of a pathologist ... Their sin is an implacable, and peculiarly American, strain of egoism." In light of revelations regarding Wallace’s abusive behavior toward Mary Karr, some scholars have questioned the motives of Wallace’s stories, particularly in the collection which prominently featured misogynistic male characters. Amy Hungerford, a professor of English at Yale University, most notably in her book Making Literature Now, posed the same question for the collection and whether we can separate the art from the artist. She concluded in the negative and argued that readers and academics should stop reading and teaching Wallace's work. Clare Hayes-Brady, a leading female Wallace scholar, responded to Hungerford's assertion in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books by emphasizing that it is the duty of a critic or scholar to engage with problematic authors and examine them closely for what they bring to the table rather than dismissing them outright. In recent times, Wallace's work, and this collection in particular, has attracted the attention of scholars and academics, with some arguing that although Wallace's behavior is unforgivable, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men can be a source of study for possible explanation on the misogynistic traits and behavior of the male gender. Critical reception The collection was selected by The New York Times as one of the notable books of the year 1999.