Following an auction between six houses, Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton has secured the rights to David Foster Wallace’s final novel, an unfinished manuscript the author called the “The Pale King.” It will be published next spring.
The imprint’s publishing director, Simon Prosser, had this glowing review at the Guardian: “I think it’s as good as Infinite Jest. I’m really, really blown away by what I’ve read … It’s absolutely incredible. The level of writing is so high. It’s just so tremendously sad that he didn’t realise how close he was to what he wanted to achieve.”
The New Yorker published an excerpt earlier this year. According to long feature about Wallace and his final work, the drafts of the manuscript totaled “several hundred thousand words,” recounting the lives of Illinois IRS workers. In 2007, the author said only one-third of the novel was finished.