This (along with "Good People") is probably the best introduction to DFW's fiction that I've found, featuring pretty-short stories in a bunch of different styles and voices. You're pretty much guaranteed to find one that you'll fall in love with, like one of the titular interviews or his second-person voice in "Forever Overhead":

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don't wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

DFW can flip into this poetic-prose mode when he wants to, but rarely does. Instead, he tries to carve at the truth using words as people speak them, and only occasionally as they don't. One essay is written as if a greek myth transplanted to late-90s Los Angeles, which takes a few pages to get used to. Most of the essays don't require such deciphering, and the ones that do try to pay off such effort through laughs or revelation.

Most of the pieces - especially the interviews - are utterly magnetic and horrifying in a way. They're all interviews with "hideous men," something that becomes clear in the telling of each. But what you don't expect is how each essay manages to hit close to home. I can recognize parts of myself in some of these writings, parts that weren't fully elucidated or realized until after they're read.

That makes them troubling, but it's what they describe that makes them horrific. They're full of moral traps, attempts at being Good that end up tragically backfiring in a way that's often masked by their intended aims. You're left with somewhat of confusion, a mixture of feelings that have to be worked out by yourself. But it's a good confusion - if that makes any kind of sense - in that you feel for once as if you're striking the motherload, uncovering the disease that produces all the aches and pains and symptoms that is the human condition.

This sounds all kind of overwrought and melodramatic and it probably is. But reading these stories, especially in close succession, is one hell of a trip. You end up looking at yourself (literally "your self") differently.

I can't recommend it enough.