Reviews:
- The L.A. Review of Books has just posted an excellent dual review/essay feature: Where was David Foster Wallace going with The Pale King?
- Being Boring by Cornel Bonca:
But it’s not Wallace’s virtuosity that makes The Pale King’s obsession with boredom extraordinary. It’s that he’s got something new to say about how we should deal with its inevitable encroachments upon daily life. It has to do with “paying attention.” “Paying attention,” in fact, not boredom, is the real theme of The Pale King. He genuflects to it in the brief opening chapter, with its direct call-out to the reader: “Look around you.”
- Unfinished Form by Lee Konstantinou:
The Pale King approaches these questions through the theme of boredom. Whereas Infinite Jest was concerned with the ways we use addictive substances and entertainment to paper over our pain, to alternately extinguish and maintain ourselves, The Pale King attempts to confront directly whatever it was we were so desperate to avoid in the first place.
- Jamie Yates's review over at Chicago Ex-Patriate, The Pale King: Taxation Representations. (6/7/11)
Non-Review Updates:
- Scott D. Moringiello's piece over at the Verdicts blog, David Foster Wallace, ora pro nobis, considers The Pale King and the light it sheds on Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus’s All Things Shining.
- The Pale King had made Salon.com's best of 2011 so far list.