Girl with Curious Hair (Norton Paperback Fiction) - Hardcover

Wallace, David Foster

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393027570 ISBN 13: 9780393027570

Publisher: WW Norton Company, 1989

Synopsis

Remarkable, hilarious and unsettling re-imaginations of reality by "a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent " (Jennifer Levin, New York Times Book Review).

Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures 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.

About this title

About the Author:

David Foster Wallace (1962―2008) is the author of Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair, Everything and More, The Broom of the System, and other fiction and nonfiction. Among his honors, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Wallace caused a critical stir with his first novel, The Broom of the System , and this volume of stories is likely to attract equal attention. His publisher talks about post -postmodernism, whatever that means, but there is a highly unusual eye and ear at work here, and an impressive armory of writerly skills. All too often, however, the stories seem like dazzling exercises, show-off pieces designed to provoke applause rather than expressions of a consistent vision. Two stories about the morbidly incestuous world of TV, "Little Expressionless Animals" and "My Appearance," catch perfectly the obsessiveness and fatuity of quiz- and talk-show people, and "Lyndon" is a tour de force in which the late president looms very large indeed. The title story is an experiment in the outre, about a grotesque Los Angeles yuppie and his punk friends, that seems designed to shock rather than illuminate. In "Say Never" Wallace enters an Isaac Bashevis Singer world, though naturally he gives it an odd twist. And the longest and most ambitious story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," deliberately flaunts writing-school experimentalism in its overwritten, satirical account of a Midwestern reunion of actors in McDonald's ads. Wallace has talent to burn, and is an endlessly inventive storyteller, but one wishes he wasn't also such an exhibitionist.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: WW Norton Company
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0393027570
• ISBN 13: 9780393027570
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384