David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. The series of stories from which this exuberantly acclaimed book takes its title is a sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connections.

List of stories

“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”
“Death Is Not the End”
“Forever Overhead”
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)”
“The Depressed Person”
“The Devil Is a Busy Man”
“Think”
“Signifying Nothing”
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
“Datum Centurio”
“Octet”
“Adult World (I)”
“Adult World (II)”
“The Devil Is a Busy Man”
“Church Not Made with Hands”
“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI)”
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
“Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko”
“On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon”
“Suicide as a Sort of Present”
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)”