The Pale King
By David Foster Wallace

The Pale Kingand is David Foster Wallace's final novel - a testament to his enduring brillianceThe Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutaie of a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life. And this is David Foster Wallace's towering, brilliant, hilarious and deeply moving final novel.'Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac'and New York Times'A bravura performance worthy of Woolf or Joyce. Wallace's finest work as a novelist'and Time'Light-years beyondand Infinite Jest. Wallace's reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken columns beloved of Romantic painters,and The Pale Kingand will stand, complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional achievement' Hari Kunzru,and Financial Times'A paradise of language and intelligence'and The Times'Archly brilliant'and Metro'Teems with erudition and ideas, with passages of stylistic audacity, with great cheerful thrown-out gags, goofy puns and moments of truly arresting clarity. Innovative, penetrating, forcefully intelligent fiction like Wallace's arrives once in a generation, if that'and Daily Telegraph'In a different dimension to the tepid vapidities that pass as novels these days. Sentence for sentence, almost word for word, Wallace could out-write any of his peers'and Scotlandand on SundayDavid Foster Wallace wrote the novelsand Infinite Jestand andand The Broom of the System, and the short-story collectionsand Oblivion,and Brief Interviews with Hideous Menand andand Girl with Curious Hair. His non-fiction includesand Consider the Lobster,and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,and Everything and More,and This is Waterand andand Both Flesh and Not. He died in 2008.