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Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily "real," almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and overtelevised 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.

Bitten by one of the snakes she is studying, Virginia Lee, an accomplished herpetologist, drives herself to the hospital, carrying a decaying antidote and using her pantyhose as a tourniquet to slow the poison's path in her bloodstream. Through the hideous traffic of L.A., she must reach her lover Terry McKechnie, who works as an emergency-room physician. Her hope and faith is in him, even as it has been withdrawn from her husband, Terry's college friend. After her arrival, Virginia desperately needs transfusions of her rare blood type-and only an explosive criminal-at-large with whom Terry has already clashed can save her life. In this "absolutely bewitching" (Jonathan Harr) novel, Craig Nova brings us into the moral morass of contemporary America, gripping us with the beauty of his exacting prose and the suspense of his riveting emotional drama. "I wouldn't delay reading a novel of Nova's, not even to complete one of my own."-John Irving "Craig Nova is a fine writer, one of our best, and if you haven't read him, the loss is yours."-Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (1997 Critic's Choice) "As skilled a piece of storytelling as Mr. Nova has yet pulled off."-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a darkly comic resolution to romantic dalliance and political intrigue.

Charles Cleasby is unable to see himself separately from his hero, Lord Horatio Nelson. However, in his research he comes upon an incident of horrifying brutality in Nelson's military career that defies all attempts at glorification, and calls Charles Cleasby's world picture into question.

Kennedy, an opportunist, orchestrates a scam that will have some intended and some thoroughly unintended consequences. For Mitsos, an unresolved family tragedy awakens again, along with his need to avenge his parents' deaths. With utterly convincing characterizations, Barry Unsworth brings us the underbelly of the forge of Western civilization.

Richard Bausch gets deep inside of people's lives. Richard Bausch gets deep inside of people's lives. He speaks eloquently for and to all of us about the intricacies of relationships-their fragility and their inherent possibility for explosion. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Atlantic Monthly; two of the stories in this collection were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

Jean Rhys was one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, a literary artist who made exqusite use of the raw material of her own often turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy. Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories.

The story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes.