The Pale King

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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

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

About David Foster Wallace

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.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 05/04/2012
ISBN: 9780141046730
Length: 592 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 25mm x 130mm
Weight: 396g
Price: £12.99

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The Pale King

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

Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remarkable

About David Foster Wallace

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