This has been widely blogged about among huge literature nerds, but I am excited and so want to make a short post.
The following links are from the New Yorker. The excerpt is from David Foster Wallace’s incomplete final novel, ‘The Pale King’ and the essay is a biographical piece that focuses especially on DFW’s struggles with said book and the general project of continuing to write fiction.
I’ve written here before about the importance his fiction holds for me. I feel like it’s so hard to write about the people that I not only admire but am somewhat in awe of- that seem not only great or exciting but actually important. Anyways, the following is classic DFW- full of technical mastery, but even more full of an intense attempt at honesty and at using craft to approach something like that honesty via a dozen simultaneously intersecting routes. Which is to say, approaching that honesty by way of perhaps the only route possible.
Tags: david foster wa, New Yorker, Pale King
Butttub's Weblog 
March 16, 2009 at 2:24 am |
This is like when they decided to publish Nabokov’s last book. I was ecstatic.