The Pale King

David Foster Wallace · first published 2011 · ISBN 9780316177931

Published posthumously and unfinished, this novel fragments multiple narrative threads around the mundane world of the Internal Revenue Service, exploring boredom, focus, and the search for meaning within a bureaucratic system designed to produce meaninglessness. Editor Michael Pietsch assembled the work from hundreds of pages of manuscript fragments and notes Wallace left behind, preserving the experimental, self-conscious form that characterized the incomplete manuscript.