The Pale King Audiobook

Quotes

• “Deeply sad, deeply philosophical…By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull—funny, maddening and elegiac…in almost everything Wallace wrote, including The Pale King, he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.”

  — New York Times

• “Feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting…this is not a novel of defeat but, rather, of oddly heroic persistence…electrifying in its portrayal of individuals seeking unlikely refuge in a vast, absurd bureaucracy. In the spirit of Borges, Gaddis, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Wallace conducts a commanding and ingenious inquiry into monumental boredom, sorrow, the deception of appearances, and the redeeming if elusive truth that any endeavor, however tedious, however impossible, can become a conduit to enlightenment.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “It doesn’t matter that the novel is unfinished. Read its chapters in random order and you’ll still be amazed by the talent. If you read only half of what is there it would be one of the best reads you’ve had in a long time. There are geniuses and there are geniuses. David Foster Wallace is both, and The Pale King is a testament to that…One of the most influential literary voices of our times.”

  — USA Today

• “Transfixing and hyper-literate…Nothing short of sublime…Achingly funny…Pants-pissingly hilarious.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “The Pale King dares to plunge readers into this Dantean hell of ‘crushing boredom,’ suggesting that something good may lie beyond…It uses the IRS as a metaphor for american sadness and loss, and American heart too…The Pale King glimmers and sparkles.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Wallace’s finest work as a novelist…when Wallace steers the tanker back to its theme—the struggle to extract meaning from each second that passes, no matter how empty or lonely or indistinguishable from the second that came before it—The Pale King achieves power levels that Wallace never reached in his first two novels…His ability to render the fine finials and fractals and flourishes of a mind acting upon itself, from moment to moment, using only the blunt, numb instruments of language, has few if any equals in American literature.”

  — Time

• “Amazing.”

  — Forbes

• “Wallace transforms this driest of settings into a vivid alternate IRS universe, full of jargon and lore and elaborately behatted characters, many of them with weird afflictions and/or puzzling supernatural abilities…Brilliant and bizarre.”

  — Entertainment Weekly