Book description
The Pale King is David Foster Wallace's final novel - a
testament to his enduring brilliance
The Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria,
Illinois, 1985. Here the minutaie 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.
'Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac' New York Times
'A bravura performance worthy of Woolf or Joyce. Wallace's finest
work as a novelist' Time
'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
'A paradise of language and intelligence' The Times
'Archly brilliant' Metro
'Teems with erudition and ideas, with passages of stylistic
audacity, with great cheerful thrown-out gags, goofy puns and moments
of truly arresting clarity. 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
David Foster Wallace wrote the novels Infinite Jest and
The Broom of the System, and the short-story collections
Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl
with Curious Hair. His non-fiction includes Consider the
Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,
Everything and More, This is Water and Both Flesh
and Not. He died in 2008.
David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008, was the author of the
acclaimed novels
Infinite Jest
and
The Broom of the System
and the short story collections
Oblivion
,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
and
Girl with Curious Hair
. His non-fiction includes several essay collections and the full-length
work
Everything and More
.
