Reddit reviews Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

I know I must be missing some, but these are all that I can think of at the moment.

Fiction:

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

White Noise by Don Delilo

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW

Infinite Jest by DFW

Of these, you can't go wrong with Infinite Jest and the Collected Fictions of Borges. His Dark Materials is an easy and classic read, probably the lightest fare on this list.

Non-Fiction:

The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy

Chaos by James Gleick

How to be Gay by David Halperin

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Secret Historian by Justin Spring

Of these, Secret Historian was definitely the most interesting, though How to be Gay was a good intro to queer theory.

It's not a book. This is an excerpt from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. If you like this, you should definitely check out the full speech or check out one of his three collection of essays. He's also got a number of short story collections, including a particularly famous work Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He's probably most famous for Infinite Jest, a novel well over a thousand pages in length.

You know, I don't have an answer. Most of the selections so far are from before Wallace's prime. (Quick aside: Philip Roth's best books are his latest, but who he was to the world was always the man who wrote Portnoy's Complaint. His worldview never changed. Rather he grew in his craft, and his later characters were various iterations of Portnoy getting old, perhaps with the great exception of American Pastoral.)

Anyway, I don't have an answer because Wallace arrived at a deadlock in American life that we have not yet overcome. He was a prophet of America's decline. What I believe Wallace wanted was certainty and authority in a time where it wasn't granted him.

Politically conservative (he voted for Reagan and admired John McCain), he was desperate for a sense of civic life that was already in decline, and he wanted badly to be led.

Raised by atheist academics, he sought out the comfort of the Church. He wanted unironically to believe in "the sub-surface unity of all things" but couldn't get himself to do so, conceding instead that, "You get to decide what to worship." His message, instead, was existential: life is what you make of it, so pay attention. But he wanted more. He sought "redemption" through literature and contemplation, seeking something of substance to soothe his "inner sap." Perhaps he found it in glimpses, but his long-time depression betrayed dissatisfaction. He searched endlessly in mythology, folklore, and collective subconscious imagery, only to catch his own tail in a Kafkaesque cat-and-mouse chase with himself.

In love, he was a bachelor, who one time contemplated murder over jealous love. He was a womanizer who held his manhood cheap, retreating to books to "feel less alone."

Like Hal in Infinite Jest, he found no authority, neither from his wild, filmmaking father, nor in the life-sucking entertainments of his time. Instead, Wallace found solace among the meek, the addicts, and the defeated (he himself suffered from alcohol abuse). Deep down, it wasn't enough. Deep down, beneath his giant brain, down in the bones of his Anglo-American stock, he knew something was wrong in America. He lamented our cafeteria democracy of boring politicians. He lamented what he called the "death of civics." Look at us now: government in chaos, the waning of religion across the West, an epidemic of addicts, no closer to cultural wisdom or unity, individuals still atomized and community still broken. (As an aside, I believe these premonitions sparked his interest in Quebec's secession movement. There, at least, people were fighting for something.)

In short, Tl;dr: Wallace was perfectionist born in a time that he couldn't perfect. What we have of him is a glorious attempt to surmount the chaos and fragmentation he felt in his heart and in the world around him. The reason I don't have an answer to your question is because I don't think anyone else got as close to articulating that as he did, and I think his fictions and his essays will be read in the future with great pity because I believe that we will rise to the occasion—in politics, in art, and in society—in due time. We always do.

Dofleini mentions that "what was on [the] desk at the moment."

Broom is much less demanding time-wise, although I agree with your sentiments... Not only is it much less polished than his later work, I think it's also less rewarding. It almost seems as though he was warming up for Jest... I enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it after Jest & Interviews. For me, it falls into the same category as the early Dickens novels: entertaining in their own right, but more interesting as a window into the foundation for more developed later work.

I'd recommend Brief Interviews or A Supposedly Fun Thing as entry points for Wallace, followed by Infinite Jest if you like what you've read.

I'd read this. Great title. Stunning. "I want." http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Interviews-Hideous-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316925195

Glad you like the taste of Wallace, not too many people do. His work can be tough to chew and digest. Check out Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of short stories. There is also Girl With Curious Hair, also a collection of short stories, but there's a story in there call Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way that's absolutely amazing.