The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
It is the story of a young man, a self-described "wastoid, " adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law.
"Like Philip Marlowe, Spenser is a man of honor in a dishonorable world.
Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ...
'Us, Rod the God Tine's got Tom Flatto's I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7. ... 'C'est ça.' 'But not so much for content,' Steeply said. 'Input/Output's exhaustive testing. Flatto's got them working on conditions ...
Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way ...
The character David Foster Wallace is introduced to the banal world of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and the host of strange people who work there, in a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author's death.
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: a collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers.
The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the ...
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
Dee squeezes Faye's arm with a thin hand that's cold from the office. Faye rubs at her nose. “She's not going to come, she told me. You'll have to bag it.” The key grip leaps for a ringing phone. “I lied,” says Faye. “My girl.