Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Pale King

David Foster Wallace's final novel is to be released April 15:
After struggling with depression for most of his adult life, writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Sept. 12, 2008 at age 46.
In one of his final acts, he tidied up the manuscript of a novel he'd been working on. The book was to be a follow-up to his 1996 masterwork, Infinite Jest. He called it The Pale King, and many said it would be a monumental contribution to contemporary fiction.
The manuscript was unfinished, but Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown and Company, felt it was too important not to make the work available to the public, finished or not.
So The Pale King will hit the bookstores later this month, incomplete but still a window into the mind of a writer considered to be one of the most gifted of his generation.
"We chose to publish on April 15 as a way of casting a comic light on a novel that has a lot of darkness surrounding it," Pietsch tells All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz.
I found Infinite Jest to be very interesting, but ultimately frustrating, and LONG.  This should top it in each way.

No comments:

Post a Comment