The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel - Hardcover

Wallace, David Foster

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316177938 ISBN 13: 9780316177931

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2011

Synopsis

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.

The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

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 was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0316177938
• ISBN 13: 9780316177931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 960