Girl With Curious Hair

Remarkable, hilarious, and unsettling re-imaginations of reality by "a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent" (New York Times Book Review).
David Foster Wallace was one of America's most prodigiously talented and original young writers, and Girl with Curious Hair displays the full range of his gifts. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures such as Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, the familiar strange.

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he became a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. His books include the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion andthe essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.