Recent from talks
The Pale King
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
The Pale King
The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his death. Before his suicide in 2008, Wallace organized the manuscript and associated computer files in a place where they would be found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
The novel was one of the three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but no award was given that year.
Like much of Wallace's work, the novel defies straightforward summary. Each chapter stands almost alone, with text ranging from straight dialogues between coworkers about civics or cartography to snippets of the 1985 Illinois tax code to poignant sensory or character sketches. Many of the chapters relate the experiences of a handful of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois in 1985. One of the characters, one of two who narrate their chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a largely fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel. Pietsch called the organization of the manuscript "a challenge like none I've ever encountered".
The fictional "Author's Foreword" is chapter 9 and is the place in the novel where Wallace's trademark footnotes run most rampant. In this chapter, he introduces the "irksome paradox" that the only bona fide fiction in the book is the copyright page's disclaimer that states "The characters and events in this book are fictitious," while at the same time acknowledging that this foreword itself is defined by that disclaimer as fictional. He further states, in the context of the same self-referential paradox, that "The Pale King is a kind of vocational memoir" and that "the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher." Other primary characters include Lane Dean Jr., Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, and Leonard Stecyk, men drawn for vastly different reasons to a career in the IRS.
Wallace began research for The Pale King in 1997, after the publication of Infinite Jest. He started writing the book around 2000. The novel (or "long thing", Wallace's usual term for it) had numerous working titles throughout this period, including Glitterer, SJF (Sir John Feelgood), Net of Gems, and What Is Peoria For?
In 2007, Wallace estimated that the novel was about one-third finished. One of his notebooks found by his widow, Karen Green (who designed the American edition's cover art), suggested a possible direction for the novel's plot: "...an evil group within the IRS is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration." Wallace's ultimate intention for the plot is unknown.
In his final hours, Wallace "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote that the Pale King manuscript Michael Pietsch edited began with "more than 1000 pages... in 150 unique chapters". The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters. (The paperback edition includes four additional scenes totaling 23 pages.)
On September 14, 2010, Pietsch announced the novel's publication date and provided further information about its plot, saying the book "takes agonizing daily events like standing in lines, traffic jams, and horrific bus rides—things we all hate—and turns them into moments of laughter and understanding", a theme Wallace addressed in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. Pietsch added, "although David did not finish the novel, it is a surprisingly whole and satisfying reading experience that showcases his extraordinary imaginative talents and his mixing of comedy and deep sadness in scenes from daily life."
Hub AI
The Pale King AI simulator
(@The Pale King_simulator)
The Pale King
The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his death. Before his suicide in 2008, Wallace organized the manuscript and associated computer files in a place where they would be found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
The novel was one of the three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but no award was given that year.
Like much of Wallace's work, the novel defies straightforward summary. Each chapter stands almost alone, with text ranging from straight dialogues between coworkers about civics or cartography to snippets of the 1985 Illinois tax code to poignant sensory or character sketches. Many of the chapters relate the experiences of a handful of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois in 1985. One of the characters, one of two who narrate their chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a largely fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel. Pietsch called the organization of the manuscript "a challenge like none I've ever encountered".
The fictional "Author's Foreword" is chapter 9 and is the place in the novel where Wallace's trademark footnotes run most rampant. In this chapter, he introduces the "irksome paradox" that the only bona fide fiction in the book is the copyright page's disclaimer that states "The characters and events in this book are fictitious," while at the same time acknowledging that this foreword itself is defined by that disclaimer as fictional. He further states, in the context of the same self-referential paradox, that "The Pale King is a kind of vocational memoir" and that "the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher." Other primary characters include Lane Dean Jr., Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, and Leonard Stecyk, men drawn for vastly different reasons to a career in the IRS.
Wallace began research for The Pale King in 1997, after the publication of Infinite Jest. He started writing the book around 2000. The novel (or "long thing", Wallace's usual term for it) had numerous working titles throughout this period, including Glitterer, SJF (Sir John Feelgood), Net of Gems, and What Is Peoria For?
In 2007, Wallace estimated that the novel was about one-third finished. One of his notebooks found by his widow, Karen Green (who designed the American edition's cover art), suggested a possible direction for the novel's plot: "...an evil group within the IRS is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration." Wallace's ultimate intention for the plot is unknown.
In his final hours, Wallace "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote that the Pale King manuscript Michael Pietsch edited began with "more than 1000 pages... in 150 unique chapters". The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters. (The paperback edition includes four additional scenes totaling 23 pages.)
On September 14, 2010, Pietsch announced the novel's publication date and provided further information about its plot, saying the book "takes agonizing daily events like standing in lines, traffic jams, and horrific bus rides—things we all hate—and turns them into moments of laughter and understanding", a theme Wallace addressed in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. Pietsch added, "although David did not finish the novel, it is a surprisingly whole and satisfying reading experience that showcases his extraordinary imaginative talents and his mixing of comedy and deep sadness in scenes from daily life."