David Foster Wallace’s Last Novel to Be Published

March 2, 2009, 9:57 am

— Updated: 9:57 am -->

David Foster Wallace’s Last Novel to Be Published

By Dave Itzkoff

Suzy Allman for The New York Times David Foster Wallace at a Manhattan bookstore in 2006.

A third and final novel by David Foster Wallace will be released posthumously by his longtime publisher, Little, Brown & Company, The Associated Press reported. The novel, called “The Pale King,” is expected to be released in 2010; according to The New Yorker, which published excerpts of its manuscript on Monday,
it focuses on a group of I.R.S. agents working in a Midwestern office,
and was about one-third complete in 2007. The novel was still
unfinished when Mr. Wallace committed suicide in September;
Little, Brown said that it will release the book, which runs “several
hundred thousand words,” along with “notes, outlines and other
material,” according to the A.P. Little, Brown previously announced
that it would publish in April a graduation speech given by Mr. Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 as a book called “This is Water.”

Excerpts from the manuscript of “The Pale King” can be found here at the Web site of The New Yorker.