Girl With Curious Hair

1989

David Foster Wallace's first collection of short stories.

David Foster Wallace is one of the most prodigiously talented young writers in America today, and Girl with Curious Hair is replete with his remarkable and unsettling re-imaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical characters like Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, where terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, the familiar strange.

1996 Norton Paperback

Contents:

• Little Expressionless Animals
  Originally appeared in The Paris Review
  
• Luckily The Account Represenatative Knew CPR
• Girl With Curious Hair
• Lyndon
  Originally appeared in Arrival
  
• John Billy
  Originally appeared in Conjunctions:12
  
• Here And There
  Originally appeared in Fiction
  
• My Appearance
  Originally appeared in Playboy under the title "Late Night"
  
• Say Never
  Originally appeared in the Florida Review
  
• Everything Is Green
  Originally appeared in Puerto de Sol and Harper's Sep 1999
  
• Westward The Course Of The Empire Takes Its Way

Reviews:

• Novelist Jenifer Levin's review of "Girl With Curious Hair" (11.5.89) from The New York Times Book Review

• Reading and riding the post-scientific wave: the shorter fiction of David Foster Wallace (1993) by James Rother, The Review of Contemporary Fiction (added here 26/6/2010)
• Conversational Reading's analysis of Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way Part 1 Part 2 (8.8.09)
• Connie Luther, David Foster Wallace: Westward with Frederic Jameson in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays.
• Philip Coleman, Consider Berkeley & Co.: Reading "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way" in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays.