David Foster Wallace has made an art of taking readers into places no other writer ever gets near. In the pages of his novels INFINITE JEST and THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM and the collections GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR and A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN, he had created as unique a voice and vies as any writer at work today, rendering a dazzling array of interior states with delicious insight and humor. In this new collection, the author extends his range and craft in twenty-two stories that intertwine hilarity with an escalating disquiet to create almos unbearable tensions. Three stories venture inside minds and landscapes that are at once recognizable and utterly strange: a boy paralyzed by fear atop a high diving board ("Forever Overhead"), a poet lounging contented beside his pool ("Death Is Not the End"), a young couple experiencing sexual uncertainties ("Adult World"), a depressed woman soliciting comfort from her threadbare support network ("The Depressed Person", chosen for Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards). The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at thier most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connection. BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN gives us men and women, celebrity and bitter loneliness, sexual posturing and naked honesty, erudition and apeman babble - a world whose emotional complexity and outright comedy closely resemble our own. In these remarkable stories, David Foster Wallace reaffirms his reputation a a "passionate and deeply serious wrtier" (San Francisco Chronicle) who again expands our ideas of the pleasures of fiction can afford.

The short stories included in this book are the following: •  The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls •  Birthday Boy •  Paula (also known as Mrs. Hincher ) Additionally, there is a letter from J. D. Salinger himself to a John Woodman.

The adventures of a girl and her gargoyle continue in the second installment of this “thrilling, funny and eerie” fantasy series. —Romantic Times on Alchemystic No Stone Unturned... Alexandra Belarus was an artist stuck working in her New York family’s business…until she discovered her true legacy—a deep and ancient magic. Lexi became the last practicing Spellmason, with the power to breathe life into stone. And as her powers awoke, so did her family’s most faithful protector: a gargoyle named Stanis. But when a centuries-old evil threatened her family and her city, Stanis sacrificed himself to save everything Lexi held dear. With Stanis gone, Lexi’s efforts to master Spellmasonry—even with the help of her dedicated friends—are faltering. Hidden forces both watch her and threaten her, and she finds herself suddenly under the mysterious wing of a secret religious society determined to keep magic hidden from the world. But the question of Stanis’s fate haunts her—and as the storm around her grows, so does the fear that she won’t be able to save him in her turn.

Jack Blackjack is ordered to eliminate a spy in Princess Elizabeth's household in this engaging Tudor mystery. June, 1554. Former cutpurse and now professional assassin Jack Blackjack has deep misgivings about his latest assignment. He has been despatched to the Palace of Woodstock, where Queen Mary's half-sister Princess Elizabeth is being kept under close guard. Jack's employer has reason to believe that a spy has been installed within the princess's household, and Jack has been ordered to kill her. Jack has no choice but to agree. But he arrives at Woodstock to discover that a murder has already been committed. As he sets out to prove his innocence by uncovering the real killer, Jack finds the palace to be a place steeped in misery and deceit; a hotbed of illicit love affairs, seething resentments, clashing egos and bitter jealousies. But who among Woodstock's residents is hiding a deadly secret – and will Jack survive long...