It’s been a morbid thing for me to ponder, but ever since David Foster Wallace–author of Infinite Jest, most famously, and a host of short stories and journalism that use humor and language in ways that continually surprise me–killed himself last September, I’ve been wondering what writing was still on his desk, unfinished and unpolished. He was a writer of astonishing output–it wasn’t a question of whether he he’d been working on stories and/or another novel he died, but how much he had done.
This Washington Post story confirms this, saying Wallace had written about 200 pages of a new novel called The Pale King when he died. An excerpt of this novel will appear in this week’s New Yorker (you can read the excerpt here, as well as a giant story by D. T. Max about Wallace and the unfinished novel.
I haven’t yet read either the New Yorker story or the Wallace excerpt, but I intend to very soon.
Anthony Pignataro 