This time next year, David Foster Wallace fans will be clamoring for his final book, an unfinished novel titled The Pale King. Wallace's longtime publisher, Little, Brown, plans to publish it in early 2010.
David Foster Wallace (Sun-Times files)
Wallace, who killed himself last September at age 46, reportedly left behind "a substantial portion" of the work, and The New Yorker is running an excerpt this week alongside an article by D.T. Max.
The story centers around a bored, entry-level IRS worker named David Wallace, who works at an Illinois tax-return processing center in the '80s.
"The Pale King is an astonishment. It is David Wallace's effort to weave a novel out of life's dark matter: boredom, banality, the 'irrelevant complexity' of everyday life, all the maddening stuff that stands between us and the rest of the world and through which we have to travel to arrive at joy," said Wallace's longtime editor, Michael Pietsch. "This was as ambitious as anything he ever did, a novel that attempts to move readers deeply and help them live their lives."
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