Posthumous

Last David Foster Wallace Novel Found

Manuscript discovered two months after he died.

200 pages from an unfinished novel with the working title The Pale King were found on the desk of literary icon David Foster Wallace two months after he killed himself last September. Today’s New Yorker publishes a short excerpt from that manuscript, along with a lengthy article that tells the story of the unfinished work, which Wallace had apparently been writing for years. The characters in the story are IRS agents working in the Midwest, struggling to transcend boredom and apathy – a favorite theme of the author of the highly acclaimed Infinite Jest. "It was different from what he had written before," says the magazine’s fiction editor of the pared-down style of the discovered prose.