Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  davidfosterwallacebooks.com

  ALSO BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  The Broom of the System

  Girl with Curious Hair

  Infinite Jest

  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  Everything and More

  Oblivion

  Consider the Lobster

  McCain’s Promise

  This Is Water

  The Pale King

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  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  WELCOME

  DEDICATION

  LITTLE EXPRESSIONLESS ANIMALS

  LUCKILY THE ACCOUNT REPRESENTATIVE KNEW CPR

  GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR

  LYNDON

  JOHN BILLY

  HERE AND THERE

  MY APPEARANCE

  SAY NEVER

  EVERYTHING IS GREEN

  WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  NEWSLETTERS

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright

  These stories are 100 percent fiction. Some of them project the names of “real” public figures onto made-up characters in made-up circumstances. Where the names of corporate, media, or political figures are used here, those names are meant only to denote figures, images, the stuff of collective dreams; they do not denote, or pretend to private information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise.

  Copyright © 1989 by David Foster Wallace

  Cover design by Keith Hayes

  Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First ebook edition: September 2014

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Part of “Little Expressionless Animals” makes use of the third stanza of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” from John Ashbery’s Selected Poems (Viking Press, 1985, pp. 192–193).

  Parts of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” are written in the margins of John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” and Cynthia Ozick’s “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)”; p. 294 of “Westward” contains the first seven lines of “Usurpation,” from Cynthia Ozick’s Bloodshed and Three Novellas (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, p. 132).

  Acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of the stories in this book originally appeared: “Little Expressionless Animals” in the Paris Review; “Lyndon” in Arrival; “Here and There” in Fiction; “John Billy” in Conjunctions; “My Appearance” in Playboy under the title “Late Night”; “Say Never” in the Florida Review; “Everything Is Green” in Puerto de Sol and Harper’s.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SUPPORT TO:

  The Trustees of the Arizona Humanities Fellowship

  The Mr. And Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children

  The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

  The Corporation of Yaddo

  ISBN 978-0-316-33889-9

  E3