The Pale King (Hardcover)

David Foster Wallace's final and most ambitious undertaking - an audacious, hilarious novel that will be a major international publishing event. 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 intriguing 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 family - 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 a writer who dared to take on the most daunting subjects the human spirit can imagine. 'The greatest American writer of his generation, and a novelist of prodigious energy, imagination and poetic power ...He was a writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as the Sterne of Tristram Shandy and the Joyce of Ulysse s.' Peter Craven, The Age ' Wallace exerted an unparalleled influence over writers who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s: Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Rick Moody and Jonathan Safran Foer are among the many contemporary novelists who avow a debt to Wallace, and look upon him as their guiding literary light. Of all his influential qualities, foremost were his intellect and his ability to allow contemporary language to pour through him onto the page as if unmediated and pure.' Malcolm Knox, Sydney Morning Herald ' A prose magician ...He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane.' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 'We can imagine his fiction and essays as the scroll fragments of a distant future. He did not channel his talents to narrower patterns. He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture.' Don DeLillo