The Pale King

The Pale King
David Foster Wallace's final novel – a testament to his enduring brilliance.

The story unfolds at the Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here, the minutiae of a million daily lives are meticulously audited, totted up, and accounted for. Within this setting, workers engage in a relentless battle against the crushing weight of their own boredom. Yet, amidst the seemingly trivial and routine, all of human life is revealed.

This is David Foster Wallace's final novel—a towering, brilliant, hilarious, and deeply moving work.

Praise for The Pale King

• "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

About the Author

David Foster Wallace was the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, as well as the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His non-fiction works include:

• Consider the Lobster
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
• Everything and More
• This is Water
• Both Flesh and Not

Wallace passed away in 2008, leaving behind a legacy of innovative, penetrating, and forcefully intelligent fiction.