This book is very clever because every story is post-something. Little Expressionless Animals, Lydon, My Appearance- Post-Delillo. Luckily...- post Beckett. Girl with curious Hair- post-Easton Ellis. John Billy- post-Faulkner. Here and There- post writing workshop (okay, that's a stretch.) Say Never- post Roth. Everything is Green- I really don't know, but induction says that this, too, is post-something. And the mother of all the posts, 'Westward the Course of Empire,' is post-Barth (unfortunat...

(4.5, but 5 for originality)If I could have anyone in the world I'd like explain what 8 dimensions looks like, David Foster Wallis would have been the man. A Frank Zappa wordsmith, be prepared to eat the yellow snow. His stories are like Jackson Pollock drip paintings. You're either going to say, "Groovy" or you just won't get it. He's Doctor Jacoby from Twin Peaks with the one-eye orange, one-eye blue sunglasses and Hawaiian T-shirt clacking on aromatic astro turf donning out "shaka brah" wavel...

This collection encompasses only ten texts, but as usual, DFW serves us A LOT of content. Mostly, he dissects society by finding narrative chiffres for media and pop culture, and it's intense and wild and fascinating, but unfortunately, he also displays his most annoying tendencies by overwriting some material in the most show-offy way imaginable. Still, when this guy is going strong, he is simply mind-blowing, so I just cut him some slack by giving him 4 stars. Two of the stories deal with a li...

Guy With Furious Hair or ~ The Toga Party ~Little of this life has been spent considering death.Paternal grandparents never known died as words on the page of a letter received long after the event; maternal grandparents took their leave in hospital, Grandfather of emphysema when his grandchild was barely a teenager with no interest in a crabby and decaying invalid, Grandmother years later of organ failure and senility surrounded by those of the family that were bothered to make the trek to her

You can't be cool unless you like David Foster Wallace. It's like a rule or something. You have to get it. You have to even refer to him by his initials: DFW. Like a password; so the other members of the cognescenti will know you are one of them, one of the cool ones. And, well, I would certainly like to be cool. So I gave this book a try. Actually, I gave the title story, Girl with the Curious Hair, four tries. I am sorry to admit that I am not cool.Girl with the Curious Hair is about a doucheb...

enyways=mah peeps sayin i red 2 much da dee eff dub but ah say tat i can neva red 2 much ah him and i can red whatevs u kow? example mah fav book [effinite gest:] ess dah best i wont red 5th times an i can neva red no buk afta an knot tink a hem, dee eff dub, an how much i luv him fur laiffe all da time u kow? example i will neva forget abut da gurrll wit tha hare an how much i luv da vice of dee eff dub an how he writs all laike mest up an weeeeeeurd but at da sam time kinda buitiful cause heh

Sometimes I can't read more than 20 pages at a time of David Foster Wallace because I get so weighed down by his detail, psychology and theme that my ADD kicks in out of self-defense. Other times I have to break because I substituted comprehension in place of breathing for too long and I just needed a more straightforward book.LyndonShe said ‘Love’ is simply a word. It joins separate things. Lyndon and I, though you would disagree, agree that we do not properly love one another anymore. Because

After finishing David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair, I had to step back awhile before reviewing in fear I would simply come across as an overzealous cheerleader yelling ‘Give me a D!....Give me a F!...Give me a W!....’. Like a teenage romance, I was so blinded by my love for this collection and author that I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I loved so much, and if this brightly burning passion was distracting me from the flaws and faults that I wouldn’t realize were there until much lat...

BEGINNING OF AN AFFAIRI saw him many times around here, since I joined the GR Club. Sometimes having tete-a-tete with one of my friends and sometimes being the cynosure of some group discussions. I thought of approaching him on many occasions but I didn’t want to come up as somewhat forward and I wasn’t even sure if he was my TYPES. Then a new year party invite brought us face to face with each other.David: Hi! How you doin?Me: *thinking about what should be an appropriate reply in correct Engli...

My main response to reading Wallace is that I’m not clever enough to read Wallace. I go through long periods in his fiction not knowing what the hell is happening and what the narrator is narrating. My second response is that Wallace wrote fiction with a universal appeal, inscrutable at times, but with a heart and a mind built by NASA. Despite this, despite his intention to strike a basic human chord, his fiction is largely the domain of the hyper-literate, or folks like me, straining to be hype...

"You hear stories, though," Muffy says. "About these lonely or somehow disturbed people who've had only the TV all their lives, their parents or whomever started them right off by plunking them down in front of the set, and as they get older the TV comes to be their whole emotional world, it's all they have, and it becomes in a way their whole way of defining themselves as existents, with a distinct identity, that they're outside the set, and everything else is inside the set."I gave this 2 star...

Expressionless Little Animals "It's 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carr

I am a DFW completist. Recently I have been suffering an anxiety that I had in fact not completed his first book of short stories, Girl with Curious Hair. It was time to reread it and banish those anxieties. In fact, best of my memory, I had cut out several years back mid-stride of “Lyndon.” Never mind why. Who would want to ask? I had, with clear evidence of memory, read the entirety of “Westward” under a tree in my backyard, upon a blanket (mom-made; Raggedy Ann and Andy pattern which had once...

Difficult, brilliant, jarring, funny, ironically earnest and earnestly ironic with the limpidity of apostasy and the remote functionality of an egg-white toaster, I just wanted to grab myself by the front of my shirt and pull myself into this dizzyingly dexterous series of fictional contortions, wending through the labyrinth of self-aware, polymathic intelligence and meta-situations to find the author—standing apart from creations that the reader assists in imbuing with life with the melancholy

Edit again: So even though I haven't read all of DFW's work yet, I think this book would be a good place to start for someone who has read none. Originally I was telling people Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but that's just because that's the first one I read and I loved it. This collection is... fucking brilliant. It's beyond my ability to really say more. I remember I was reading "Little Expresionless Animals" the day before DFW died, and I was like "oh my god I can't believe someone this

David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives 'inventive,' 'unique,' and 'original' seem blasé. — T.C. BoyleT.C. Boyle turns the buddy blurb into an art form, making the adjectives 'hyperbolic,' 'obsequious,' and 'pompous ass' seem passé. Furthermore, dude looks like a Q-tip dipped in iodine. — Arthur Graham I don't know what happened, but I'm pretty sure I was supposed to like this way more than I did.While there were definitely some solid stori