A review by explodinghead
Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

3.0

Like most books of short stories, David Foster Wallace's GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR is a grab-bag of sorts. Some of the stories are not very interesting (about half), and some are pretty great. Particularly, "My Appearance" is a nice summation of Wallace's irony-as-false, irony-as-destructive philosophy. GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR really shines with its ending story, a novella titled "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way". The novella is a playful piece of metafiction that serves as a impassioned critique of metafiction, and it is alone worth the price of admission here.

Of all of the stories, I'd say the above two mentioned stories are crucial to the DFW canon.