7. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), David Foster Wallace

If you’re the type of depressed person who’s thrilled when you come across a person who describes to a T all your toxic self-hatred, overanalysis and social sensitivity, you need to go out and buy David Foster Wallace’s short fiction collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men right now. Granted, not every piece in the collection is of the intense-psychic-analysis vein, but the ones that are will leave you sort of stunned. If you’ve read Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and enjoyed the author’s ability to describe perfectly the toxicity of certain thought patterns, you’ll be blown away with what DFW does here. Note: particularly enjoyable in the collection are “Adult World” (I and II), “The Depressed Person” and “Octet.”