Girl With Curious Hair

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349111025

Price: £9.99

ON SALE: 6th November 1997

Genre: Modern & Contemporary Fiction (post C 1945) / Short Stories

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‘A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian… he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddam him’ Zadie Smith, Guardian

‘David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives ”inventive”, ”unique” and ”original” seem blasé’ T. Coraghessan Boyle

‘Truly funny surreal humour’ San Francisco Chronicle

Girl With Curious Hair
is replete with the prodigious talent of David Foster Wallace and his remarkable and unsettling re-imaginations of reality. From an eerily ‘real’, almost holographic evocation of Lyndon B. Johnson, to over-televised 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.

Reviews

Puncturing the veneer of power lies at the crux of this collection, and attention to detail illuminates the banal. Wallace's control of different voices is superb, given the individual style of each tale
The Times
It is his prose that really sets him apart; sometimes eerily banal, at others so densely observed you're scared to blink, and making ordinary situations seem strangely disconnnected from reality. Cleverness and verbosity are additional key ingredients, and the effect is often brilliant.
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives ''inventive'', ''unique'' and ''original'' seem blasé. He is quick-blooded and good, and these are very fine stories indeed
T. Coraghessan Boyle
A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian... he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddam him
Zadie Smith
This collection of ten tales provides ample proof of his virtuosity for the uninitiated... This is not a writer for the squeamish... but his satirical mastery of speech patterns and his eye for the grotesque can astonish
Daily Telegraph
It is his prose that really sets him apart; sometimes eerily banal, at others so densely observed you're scared to blink, and making ordinary situations seem strangely disconnected from reality. Cleverness and verbosity are additional key ingredients, and the effect is often brilliant
Scotland on Sunday
A collection of stories as varied in length and theme as they are imaginative, and as downright bizarre as any collection by one author has a right to be. Truly funny surreal humour.
San Francisco Chronicle
These stories say something serious and sincere about the world that the rest of us have to live in
Washington Post Book World
Puncturing the veneer of power lies at the crux of this collection, and attention to detail illuminates the banal. Wallace's control of different voices is superb, given the individual style of each tale.
THE TIMES
A collection of stories as varied in length and theme as they are imaginative, and as downright bizarre as any collection by one author has a right to be. Truly funny surreal humour
San Francisco Chronicle
A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent - Mr Wallace brings us, time and again, to hidden, mythic places that are strangely yet oddly familiar. He succeeds in restoring grandeur to modern fiction
New York Times Book Review
This collection of ten tales provides ample proof of his virtuosity for the uninitiated... This is not a writer for the squeamish... but his satirical mastery of speech patterns and his eye for the grotesque can astonish.
DAILY TELEGRAPH