The Pale King: Foster D. Wallace - Softcover

David Foster Wallace

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241962110 ISBN 13: 9780241962114

Publisher: Penguin, 2012

Synopsis

The Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutiae of a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life. And this is David Foster Wallace's towering, brilliant, hilarious and deeply moving final novel.

'Light-years beyond Infinite Jest. Wallace's reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken columns beloved of Romantic painters, The Pale King will stand, complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional achievement' Hari Kunzru, Financial Times

'Archly brilliant' Metro

About this title

Review:

One of the strangest, saddest, most haunting things I've ever read (Guardian)

Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac (The New York Times)

Innovative, penetrating, forcefully intelligent fiction like Wallace's arrives once in a generation, if that (Daily Telegraph)

In a different dimension to the tepid vapidities that pass as novels these days. Sentence for sentence, almost word for word, Wallace could out-write any of his peers (Scotland on Sunday)

Rich and substantial and alive . . . Wallace's finest work as a novelist (Time)

A transfixing and hyper-literate descent into relentless, inescapable despair . . . achingly funny, nothing short of sublime (Publishers Weekly)

The Pale King contains what's sure to be some of the finest fiction of the year . . . he was the closest thing we had to a recording angel (GQ)

Sometimes as a critic the most important part of your job is to say: here, this is it, we've found it, someone's doing it. That someone was Wallace. He was the real thing (Evening Standard)

The Pale King gave me a pleasure and excitement that I can describe only as biological. That is to say, the book produced in me that very rare, warm, head-to-toe tingling that comes with admission to a paradise of language and intelligence (Joseph O' Neill The Times)

Remarkable (Jonathan Derbyshire New Statesman)

About the Author:

David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008, was the author of the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. His final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011. He is also the author of the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair, and his non-fiction includes several essay collections and the full-length work Everything and More.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0241962110
• ISBN 13: 9780241962114
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592