All you David Foster Wallace fans out there - I'm assuming there are a lot of you - should go immediately to http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/uncollected-dfw.html, a pretty comprehensive archive of "Uncollected DFW." It's fantastic; tons of really obscure articles/essays/excerpts available for download in PDF format.
In other news, amazon.com has made The Pale King available for pre-order. The unfinished novel will be out on April 15th ('11) - yes, tax day - and it apparently details the trials of IRS agents working in an atmosphere of crushing boredom. Like DFW's Kenyon College Commencement Address (2005), it will advance the idea that "mindfulness" - concentration on, immersion in, and acceptance of the present moment - transforms even the most boring, meaningless existence into something beautiful. The cover art is by DFW's widow, Karen Green.
The really sad irony here is that this is the book that in some sense killed DFW: struggling to move forward with the massive project - the book that would do away with his baroque, pomo past and instead handle universal issues in spare prose - he began to suspect that his antidepressant (Nardil) was dulling his mental firepower. He stopped taking it in 2007, jumpstarting the final downward spiral that would result in his suicide on September 12th, 2008. The New Yorker writes that "In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This [The Pale King] was his effort to show the world what it was to be 'a fucking human being.'" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=13)
So the book's (pre) availability is bittersweet. Part of me can't wait to get my hands on it in April; part of me is already dreading reaching that final page.
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