The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. After Wallace's suicide on September 12, 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages. Like much of Wallace's work, the novel defies... straightforward summary. Each chapter stands almost alone, with text ranging from straight dialogues between coworkers about civics or masturbation to snippets of the 1985 Illinois tax code to poignant sensory or character sketches, and each brings something different to the whole of the novel. Many of the chapters relate the experiences of a handful of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois in 1985. One of the characters, one of two who narrate their chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a wholly fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel.
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