The Pale King | The Pale King |
| Sunday, 01 March 2009 | |
The Pale King2011     Launch Events List - click here. My Personal and spoiler free impressions of The Pale King:
Reviews (Oldest First):
Non-Review Updates (latest first):
The Simple Ranger Section Guide for The Pale King Major Spoiler! A section by section run down of the book. Order The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel from Amazon.com Set at an IRS tax-return-processing center in Illinois in the mid-1980s, The Pale Kingis the story of a crew of entry-level processors and their attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium. “The Pale Kingmay be the first novel to make accountants and IRS agents into heroes,” says Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s longtime agent and literary executor. Michael Pietsch, Little, Brown’s publisher and The Pale King’s editor, says, “Wallace 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. 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.” Little, Brown will publish 'The Pale King' on April 15 2011 (read the Sep 14 press release)—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. (From 'The Unfinished' by D. T. Max see below) StarTribune.com has run an AP update about The Pale King: Little, Brown said in a statement Sunday that the novel runs "several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material." The most interesting tidbit is from EW.com (David Foster Wallace novel 'The Pale King' due in 2010) [DFW's editor Michael Pietsch] told EW exclusively that upon publication Little, Brown will create a website to make large chunks of the manuscript available to fans, so they can see how the book came together and "have a detailed sense of Wallace as a working writer." Info from Michael Pietsch at the MLA09 DFW Panel:
Confirmed excerpts from 'The Pale King':
Possible excerpts (pure speculation, but based on DFW's reference to them as fragments): Three fragments from a longer thing available as an audio reading at the Lannan Foundation by DFW and A 'fragment' DFW read at the New Mexico State University in 2007. It was about "a father/husband who was killed when part of him got caught in the closing doors of a subway train, and his family's attempts to deal with it". The reading was at least 30 minutes. (Thanks to Evan who contacted me about this back in 0ct 08, this is still a mystery, did anyone else hear it?)
The already published shorts "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and Incarnations of Burned Children may be (or may have been) shorter chapters in the novel. Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes: And finally, Michael Pietsch discussed The Pale King; I madly took notes, but they’re a little disjointed. Pietsch says Wallace had been working on since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including “Glitterer,” “SJF” (which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and “What is Peoria For?” As we’ve heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, and so forth. What I hadn’t heard before today was that various pieces we’ve seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapters of the novel, including “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” and “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity. The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we’ve heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn’t there to argue with. [Via Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Planned Obsolescence] Two pages from the manuscript of 'The Pale King' and artwork from David Foster Wallace's wife, Karen Green. The Unfinished, D. T. Max's amazing essay about DFW including details about his third novel, 'The Pale King'. Spoiler Note: If you have not yet read/finished Infinite Jest or The Broom of the System be careful, there are a number of spoilers, including the final lines from both novels. There is also substantional info about 'The Pale King' so be careful re: its publication next year. The essay is a tremendous and moving read with substantial reference to DFW's life and works (but watch the spoilers). DFW Research for 'The Pale King' A research quote from the New Yorker Essay: Wallace began the research for “The Pale King” shortly after the publication of “Infinite Jest.” He took accounting classes. He studied I.R.S. publications. “You should have seen him with our accountant,” Karen Green remembers. “It was like, ‘What about the ruling of 920S?’ ” He enjoyed mastering the technicalities of the I.R.S. bureaucracy—its lore, mind-set, vocabulary. Remember this old conversation from 1998 between Gus Van Sant and DFW from Dazed and Confused? DFW: I'm on leave this year. I'm auditing a class but I'm not teaching. The class I'm auditing is a real bitch but somehow I'm holding on at a high C or low B. GVS: What's the class? DFW: It's ah, it's advanced tax accounting, which is a long story and you probably don't want to know about it but it's wa-a-a-y over my little noggin'. It's a Will Hunting class. GVS: Oh my God. DFW: 35 pages of incredibly dense, you know, CPA stuff at night and then you get tested on it the next day. Full conversation: http://www.badgerinternet.com/%7Ebobkat/dazed.html |
