Thoughts on this?

Worth skimming but it gets tedious and gimmicky.

>>9563396
Totally agree. I couldn't finish it. And I've tried to read it several times but it just gets really boring. This book is filled with great forms and techniques though.

>>9563396
Really? I loved this book, I think it starts boring but keeps getting better (there are really dull partos though).

>>9562853
Ironically, it's the same kind of written-to-illustrate-to-my-readers-that-I-am-indeed-clever thing that Wallace would berate his students for writing.

That being said, it is legitimately clever. Had a great time reading, enjoyed almost every story. Parts of it really made me feel. I'd like to write something in the style of the pop quiz stories one day, but I don't have any ideas suited to the format.

Oh, and the film adaptation was spotty but worth watching for the performance of the bathroom attendant piece.

>>9563527
Film adaptation?

>>9563534
http://www.watchfree.to/watch-614c-Brief-Interviews-with-Hideous-Men-movie-online-free-putlocker.html

Like I said, there's some really rough spots, because they insert a female protagonist who's supposed to be "getting to the bottom of like men and stuff" and suck a lot of the ambiguity out of the interviewees.

A lot of the appeal of the book (for me, at least) was that most of the men weren't necessarily bad people, just products of their culture, and the reader could conceivably walk away either pitying or condemning them. In the film, this nuance disappears, and a lot of the edge cases get shifted into clear this-guy-is-a-douche territory.

Still, watch it if you have the time. I'd love to discuss things in more detail.

I liked the bit with the guy who was trying to masturbate to the idea that he could freeze time and sexually assault people without them knowing, but he keeps getting caught up in the kinda logistics of freezing time, because that exact thing happened to me a lot when I was younger.

>>9562853
Both his best and worst writing overall. He was pretty blatantly aping some other authors in some of the stories.

>>9563539
Thanks anon. I'll check it out and report back.

>>9562853
His best non-novel. People always hype up Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing, but this was my first thing I read by him (finished everything but Broom now) and I still come back to it a lot.

The brief interviews themselves are amazing, very funny stuff and there are some intellectually dense interviews too. Sure, there are some fuck ups that probably shouldn't have made it in, but there's just so much material in there in blows all of his other non-fiction and short fiction books out of the water.

Liek every collection of stories he released it has very high points and very low points, but it's pretty good overall, in some ways I was creepily familiar with the thoughts of some of the men being interviewed

>>9563751
It was very clear that he was not assaulting anybody. Interesting that you got that from it though.

Church not built with hands is one of my favorite short stories even though I still feel like it goes completely over my head every time I've read it.

Really lightweight stuff.

>>9564624
That's the only story I hated in the collection. Can you expand on why you love it so much?

>>9562853
>He believed not only the passive 2-D Sissee Nar was the timeless & ideal object of his deepest longings but that this love was by nature unconsummatable in the merciless daylight of 3-D reality.
Prophetic, really.