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David Foster Wallace's Latest (and Posthumous) Novel About,

Published: Sep 22, 2010

 Finance       

It's about time that accountants get their novel.

For years, their white-shoe cousins, investment bankers, have had a handful of great works of fiction to choose from to read about their ilk (Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, Adam Haslett's Union Pacific, to name a few) whereas accountants haven't had even a single halfway decent novel to turn to when seeking to learn more about their own psyches, but thanks to the late, great David Foster Wallace, that's all about to change, next year at the close of tax season: on April 15, 2011, what accoutants (and all of us) have to look forward to is DFW's posthumous novel, The Pale King, which, along with a release date, now has cover art, provided by DFW's widow, Karen Green; among TPK's subjects is "an IRS tax-return-processing center in Illinois in the mid-1980s" where "a crew of entry-level processors attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium.”

Last year, The New Yorker excerpted a few pages of the book, under the title Wiggle Room.

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