The Pale King

While detailed structural outlines were recovered along with the partial manuscript, Simon Prosser, the publishing director of Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton (who had the successful bid for the rights) is resolute that the manuscript will be published as is, rather than anyone attempting to ‘finish’ it.

via Unfinished David Foster Wallace Novel to be Published | Reading Copy Book Blog

The late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is set for publication in the UK next year following an intensely contested auction between six British publishers.”

via mbf tod@y: Unfinished Foster Wallace novel finds UK publisher

Following an auction between six houses, Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton has secured the rights to David Foster Wallace’s final novel, an unfinished manuscript the author called the “The Pale King.” It will be published next spring.

The imprint’s publishing director, Simon Prosser, had this glowing review at the Guardian: “I think it’s as good as Infinite Jest. I’m really, really blown away by what I’ve read … It’s absolutely incredible. The level of writing is so high. It’s just so tremendously sad that he didn’t realise how close he was to what he wanted to achieve.”

via UK Rights Sold for David Foster Wallace’s Last Work – mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

Penguin will publish next spring, said Prosser, who was adamant that although the work is unfinished, nothing would be added to it. “You’ll get literally 50 pages of a perfect section, then a note to himself saying ‘insert X here’. In a lot of cases, the X exists, but there will be some parts that don’t. The challenge will be to remain as true as possible to what is there,” he said. “Personally I think that if ‘notes to self’ are included, it’ll be fine. We’ll obviously present it as an unfinished novel – he himself thought he hadn’t finished it. What’s so tragic is that he didn’t realise how close he was.”

via Unfinished Foster Wallace novel finds UK publisher | BlogRabbit

Yesterday, at Hamish Hamilton, we announced a major new acquisition that is of particular significance to me; the posthumous masterpiece, the ‘Long Thing’ my literary hero had been working on since Infinite Jest, a new novel from David Foster Wallace, The Pale King.  When The New Yorker ran an extract from the novel, Wiggle Room, I couldn’t believe it. Still raw from the tragic loss of his death, suicide at a mere 46 after a lifetime of severe depression, I couldn’t believe that there was more. And not just an unpublished story, or an essay, but a novel.

via The Penguin Blog: This is why I work in publishing

Even after death, a writer can speak. In this case, David Foster Wallace, who wrote Infinite Jest (given the honor of the All-Time 100 Greatest Novels according to TIME Magazine), has one last hurrah: his unfinished novel The Pale King is being published by UK house Hamish Hamilton. Check out an impassioned blog post about the subject at the Penguin Blog.

via The Big Bad Book Blog » Blog Archive » It’s a Big, Bad Book World: This Week In Publishing

When he wrote this in 1991, Wallace himself had just started writing an “often parodic, surreal and grotesque” novel “set in [the] near and recognizable future” that sought “to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism,” and more than a little et cetera.  I’d never considered my passion for both novelists related until I stumbled across this review a few months back.  The coldness Wallace speaks of in Ballard’s prose is utterly unlike anything you find in Wallace’s own work.  Even when his narrators speak, as he claimed Ballard’s do, in a “flat, scholarly narrative voice, [with] an air of lab technicians looking at stuff under glass,” the result never resembles the clipped, clinical speech of which Ballard was a master—for in Wallace, such disinterested precision is always affected.  But without Ballard, there would have been no Wallace; in fact, without Ballard, contemporary literature would look very different. 

via Acephalous: How awful have these past few months been for contemporary letters?

It was the most fun and the most painful thing, really. I guess it was summer of 1997 when we were talking about porn. He was in the middle of writing Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, because I know that his short story “Adult World” directly came out of his porn research. “Big Red Son” and “Adult World” complement each other. I guess he had been approached by Spin and he suggested writing about the AVN Awards under a pseudonym, because he had told his agent he wasn’t going to do magazine work for two years. But he was interested enough in this topic that he was willing to go back on it, and didn’t want his name plastered all over magazine covers looking like he had lied. Then he remembered he had discussed the idea with me, and wanted Premiere to have a crack at this piece. That’s where it started. Spin didn’t get the piece, which is sad for them, but the thing that I had, which was great for the piece, was knowing the Hustlerwriter Evan Wright, and I also knew Scotty Schwartz, the former child actor who had gone into porn, sort of, and these guys were going to be able to introduce us to all these porno people. We definitely brought some more research mojo to the table than Spin in that respect, I guess. We ended up buying quite a few porno videocassettes and shipping them off to Dave in Normal, Illinois, where he’d take notes, send them back to us and we’d keep them because eventually we’d have to fact check. AVN was very excited about working with us, so they ended up sending us their magazine for quite some time. That magazine had the best ads in the history of magazines.

via New York – Sound of the City – David Foster Wallace, Magazine Writer

The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imagination’s categories of “difficult,” “postmodern,” and “genius,” and beyond the author’s own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We invite a reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new perspectives of his entire oeuvre.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to announce a one-day conference devoted to the discussion of Wallace’s work, to be held Friday, November 20th 2009, from 9 am to 5 pm. Please send your abstracts of no more than 250-words by August 15th, along with contact info and institutional affiliation (if any), to: footnotesconference@gmail.com

via Las obras de Roberto Bolaño » Footnotes David Foster Wallace Conference Call for Papers

Perhaps Quillblog is too much of a purist, but it’s disheartening to learn that Wallace apparently subscribed to the David Sedaris view that strict truthfulness is for lesser mortals. It’s also pretty dismaying to see a major magazine knowingly allowing falsehoods as long as (a) nobody’s likely to sue, and (b) “the writer’s a very big deal.”

via David Foster Wallace: consider the exaggerations | Quill & Quire