These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The rise of serial television’s anti-heroes raises a key question: why would we want to subject ourselves to lengthy interactions with such hideous men? 3 Keywords 2 One common trait shared by many contemporary serialised primetime programmes is the prominence of unsympathetic, morally questionable or villainous men at their narrative centre, a trend typically identified by the character type of the anti-hero. But as I argue elsewhere, serial television is distinguished by the long timeframes it creates, and thus any interaction with hideous men found in an ongoing series’ regular cast will last quite awhile. 1 Most fictional television abides by this implication, where distasteful and unpleasant characters are treated briefly, whether as unsympathetic figures on an anthology programme like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) or single-episode villains emerging in the course of a procedural’s police investigation or medical case. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.In his collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace creates a resonant implication between the two adjectives in his title - if we’re going to spend time in the company of hideous men, it best be brief. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996.

He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University.

He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.

Brief conversations with hideous men