Little, Brown Announces Last Foster Wallace Book

By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 3/2/2009 7:33:00 AM

The rumors that there was an unfinished David Foster Wallace novel circulating, waiting to be announced in the aftermath of the author's suicide in September, have finally been laid to rest. Little, Brown, Wallace's longtime publisher, has announced that The Pale King will hit shelves in early 2010.

The novel, indeed unfinished, is the subject of a current New Yorker article by D.T. Max and, per LB, Wallace had been working on the book for years, leaving behind "a substantial portion" of it. About a tax man named David Wallace who starts a new job at an IRS tax-return processing center in Illinois in the mid 1980s, the book will clock in at "several hundred thousand" words and will, according to LB, feature CliffsNotes-like addendum--notes and outlines among other things--to "help readers understand" the work.

Michael Pietsch, LB publisher and Wallace's editor, said the book is "as ambitious as anything [Wallace] ever did" and marks his "effort to weave a novel out of life’s dark matter: boredom, banality, the ‘irrelevant complexity’ of everyday life."