Adam Plunkett has written an extensive memorial/review of The Pale King for n+1, King of Ghosts, it's a must read piece:
“Turgid,” he wrote to me about the first essay I wrote for him. I hadn’t known the word; it sounded like “rigid” and “turd.” Prolix, he elaborated—abstract, clunky, unclear, obfuscatory, “evincing all the worst qualities of academic writing.” My essay had been written for professors, which was like writing for no audience, or worse. I should ideally write my second essay with an eight-word sentence limit and for an audience of 10-year-olds. Unless I were to change my writing drastically, I’d “spend the rest of my life producing only academic essays,” he wrote, before in green pen he changed “essays” to “prose” and added “middling” before “academic,” to be perfectly clear.
n+1 have collected a number of pieces of writing about DFW:
- Chad Harbach's, David Foster Wallace! Oblivion, Infinite Jest. (22/7/04)
- Benjamin Kunkel's, DFW 1962-2008 (16/9/08)
- Jared Roscoe's, Wallace, Teacher: A Reminiscence. (18/9/08)
- Michael Casper's, Posthumous Gratitude . (11/9/09)