Little, Brown plans to publish 'The Pale King' in April 2011 (Current publication date confirmed Dec 09) —expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. (From 'The Unfinished' by D. T. Max see below)

 

Info from Michael Pietsch at the MLA09 DFW Panel:

• DFW had been working on TPK since 1996.
• It's had a number of working titles: "Glitterer," "SJF "(which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and "What is Peoria For?"
• Some of the pieces of short fiction collected elsewhere are chapters of the novel including "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Incarnations of Burned Children." (No clarification if this means they are part of TPK, Nick)
• Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, an so forth. (Check out the DFW Research notes at the bottom of the page here)
• There are more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. (With a number of publication date changes already I'd say this is not yet set in stone, Nick)
• 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.

 

 

 

 

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).

 

 

 

 

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/~bobkat/dazed.html