One of Wallace's eminent talents is his ability to juxtapose pseudo-academic discourse with unerring recreations of modern American vernacular, and the variety of voices, from the blue-collar to the would-be intellectual, add up to a comically unappealing and disconcertingly vivid portrait of the American male and his view of women. The brief interviews of the title are interspersed with the other stories and form a series of overheard conversations transcribed as if from tape. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as 'short stories'.' These stories are difficult to categorise, roaming wilfully across the boundaries of genres and inventing new ones, a fact that Wallace appears to be self-mockingly acknowledging in 'Octet': 'You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. Long before Dave Eggers attracted critical attention for the tongue-in-cheek metafictional self-deconstructing style in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, David Foster Wallace (who generously gave Eggers a cover quote) had been honing that particular voice to perfection.

David foster wallace brief interviews