The Pale King
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Narrated by:
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Robert Petkoff
About this listen
The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote.
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless, and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions - questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society - through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
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Editorial reviews
David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King is a challenging listen. This is made explicit in the introduction from Wallace’s editor and friend, Michael Pietsch, who put the novel together from more than 1,000 pages left behind after Wallace’s suicide in 2008. The intricate, rambling novel is held together by five men including a character named David Wallace who work at an IRS processing center in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. There are forays into tax law, nearly rhapsodic tales of drug use, the ennui of working life, and copious footnotes that are a Wallace trademark.
Robert Petkoff is a reassuring presence as narrator of The Pale King, having voiced other Wallace novels. That history makes Petkoff adept at wrapping his tongue around the stream-of-consciousness writing and its varying moods and emotions. Petkoff has a casual, well-enunciated style that he can bend into arch sarcasm, deadpan humor, and even a robotic-sounding transcription machine. Wallace often breaks the narrative with asides, in this case with tax code information, and Petkoff drops his voice to indicate these pauses before picking up the main storyline again. When Wallace switches to first person, writing as his alter-ego, Petkoff gives him a looser, more energetic voice that one can imagine isn’t too far from the late author’s own.
The novel might be best summed up in a passage where Wallace describes the chronic worrier Claude Sylvanshine as he transfers to a new IRS office: “The whole thing presented such a cyclone of logistical problems and complexities, Sylvanshine was forced to do some thought-stopping merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista.” The Pale King is indeed a cyclone of complexities and might require multiple listens to absorb, but Petkoff is to be commended for diving in and bringing an extra layer of cohesion to an often-chaotic novel. Collin Kelley
Critic reviews
"One hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.” (Publishers Weekly)
"Deeply sad, deeply philosophical...The Pale King will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace's oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window...into this immensely gifted writer's vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of America." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
"The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." (Laura Miller, Salon)
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- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
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What if the drink you just spilled, the train you just missed, or the lottery ticket you just found was not just a random occurrence? What if it's all part of a bigger plan? What if there's no such thing as a chance encounter? What if there are people we don't know determining our destiny? And what if they are even planning the fate of the world? Enter the Coincidence Makers - Guy, Emily, and Eric - three seemingly ordinary people who work for a secret organization devoted to creating and carrying out coincidences. What the rest of the world sees as random occurrences, are, in fact, carefully orchestrated events.
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Amazing!
- By Gal Wolff on 07-31-18
By: Yoav Blum
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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Blind Lake
- By: Robert Charles Wilson
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, "writes superior science fiction thrillers." His Darwinia won Canada's Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.
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DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-22-15
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A Killing in the Hills
- A Novel (Bell Elkins, Book 1)
- By: Julia Keller
- Narrated by: Shannon McManus
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
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What’s happening in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas of the country just like Acker’s Gap? Or were Dean Streeter, Shorty McClurg, and Lee Rader targeted somehow?
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A wonderful treat!
- By Joanne on 09-11-12
By: Julia Keller
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
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It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Baltimore Blues
- Tess Monaghan, Book 1
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Deborah Hazlett
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
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Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent—including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety—and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée—make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence could prove costly to Tess.
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I'm on #8 - This series is almost unique
- By connie on 02-19-12
By: Laura Lippman
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The Conspiracy Club
- By: Jonathan Kellerman
- Narrated by: Rob Kahn
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, Dr. Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise and warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work as staff psychologist at City Central Hospital, only to be drawn deeper into a waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn Banks.
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Disappointin Departure
- By Tom on 12-03-03
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Road Dog
- Life and Reflections from the Road as a Stand-up Comic
- By: Dov Davidoff
- Narrated by: Dov Davidoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Road Dog is comedian, actor, and writer, Dov Davidoff's unflinching memoir told through reflections of twelve months on the road. Davidoff travels across the country from college campuses to local theaters doing stand-up comedy and telling it like it is. He's been known to wax poetic about everything from encounters with large fake breasts, to people who have too many kids, to magnum condoms the size of CD cases. He is hilarious and relatable and will have you laughing at yourself in no time.
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dark, real, & exceptional
- By Luis F Rodriguez on 11-22-17
By: Dov Davidoff
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Murphy's Boy
- By: Torey Hayden
- Narrated by: Loretta Rawlins
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.
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want to meet Kevin
- By Cherish on 10-14-15
By: Torey Hayden
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Impossible to use without Chapter Names
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How this differs from the other version
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Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
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This is ABRIDGED
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Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
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With footnotes!
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In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
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Wonderful book, terrible narration!
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In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
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Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
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This is ABRIDGED
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With footnotes!
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Wonderful book, terrible narration!
- By Karen on 08-20-13
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The Broom of the System
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At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind-numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great-grandmother, a one-time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.
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Evidence I WASTED my College years.
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Girl with Curious Hair
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From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.
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This book is not NOT a Datsun!
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Everything and More
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Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace takes us from Aristotle to Newton, Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and finally Georg Cantor and his set theory. Through it all, Wallace proves to be an ideal guide - funny, wry, and unfailingly enthusiastic. Featuring an introduction by Neal Stephenson, this edition is a perfect introduction to the beauty of mathematics and the undeniable strangeness of the infinite.
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Equations via audio are tuff
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Both Flesh and Not
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Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not", considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2", which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and more.
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Both Perfect and Not
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On Tennis
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From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. A "long-time rabid fan of tennis," and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace's five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time.
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Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform
- By Darwin8u on 01-27-17
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
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Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
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David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
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Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
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The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
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Gravity's Rainbow
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Overall
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Performance
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
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By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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This Is Water
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Overall
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Story
How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.
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Too short for what you pay for!
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This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording
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Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others.
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The best 20 minutes of my life.
- By John Nosal on 10-09-12
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Consider the Lobster (A Story from Consider the Lobster)
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Overall
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Performance
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Long renowned as one of the smartest writers on the loose, David Foster Wallace reveals himself in Consider the Lobster to be also one of the funniest. In this program, he ranges far and farther in his search for the original, the curious, or the merely mystifying. He discovers the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the Maine Lobster Festival and confronts the inevitable question just beyond the butter-or-cocktail-sauce quandary.
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David Foster Wallace...a good place to start
- By Rick on 11-25-08
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The Recognitions
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
What listeners say about The Pale King
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- T. C. Pile
- 09-26-11
David Foster Wallace Lives
Ever struggle with tedium? Who hasn't? Did you know the word "boring" did not exist in the English language until the advent of the Machine Age? I did not, until this fact was revealed in the course of experiencing David Foster Wallace's final epic, The Pale King. This labor of love, painstakingly brought to life by the author's long-time editor Michael Pietsch when the work was left unfinished after Wallace's suicide in 2008, reveals the infinity underneath boredom. Wallace removes the lid from the gaping void that is always right there for those who dare to look. Clearly, he spent a lot of time looking down that hole, for better or for worse. -paragraph-
Wallace has the gift of being able to stop time. He dives deep down in a headfirst rush into a single moment, peeling back the layers of thought, memory, feeling, experience, sensation, and circumstance that overlay every simple act, until they all stand exposed and elucidated. Then, just as quickly, he yanks you back up to the surface, back to the mundane and ordinary, back to the normal, back to the squeak of the wheel in the document collector's cart in the IRS processing center where much of the "action" in the Pale King takes place. Sometimes you feel like a fish gasping for water in the naked sunlight. Sometimes you feel as though you've been given some tremendous gift, a gem of insight that will sustain you and nourish you for years. -paragraph-
The IRS? As subject matter for a novel? I cannot imagine anyone else who could pull this off. While the book is understandably ragged in many ways, Pietsch has made it hold together so that the undeniable voice of David Foster Wallace comes through loud and clear. The audiobook's narration is handled masterfully by Robert Petkoff. He lives inside the 200-word sentences, the parenthetical asides, the footnotes, and the flights of language that are Wallace's trademarks, making them real, accessible, and meaningful. -paragraph-
David Foster Wallace lives.
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15 people found this helpful
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Overall
- dd
- 06-07-11
Not perfect but very good
This book is about many things: Its about tedium, attention span, its about the joy of focussing on a task. The agony of drifting focus.
I can see how these thoughts could be the meat of anybody that has to create for a living. In the IRS, he certainly found the best setting to talk about difficult tedious work requiring concentration.
It's like an ADD manifesto, and minefield all in one.
He describes the creative process or should I say the productive working process, his character's motivation and thought processes better than anything I have ever seen. I'm 70% so I don't know if he gets to put it all together at the end. But It is a really amazing Listen.
But I have to say, no Evelyn Wood would ever get me through this thing. Definitely an audible-only recommendation. If you really liked "but eventually you become yourself" you'll love this.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Jonathan Jordan
- 01-25-16
Meta as meta gets
Loved it. Loved the idea of hiding in the details. Loved the prose. Loved the boredom. Loved the floating off the chair, the sweating, the page turning, the meditative breathing... Loved.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Steve M.
- 06-02-12
Compelling Profound Book about Tedium
Tedium, trivia and selfconsciousness as the essence of life. Drinian, the android/alien IRS examiner, is one of the most mysterious and compelling literary creations since...oh, don't know, something in Pynchon back when he was hitting all the marks, as is the agent he understands/misunderstans so well. Unfinished, tragically, Imbued with the strangness of the really real, undeniably. Not right or fair in the least that an incredible writer like Wallace is dead. Damn! Damn! Damn!.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Shawn
- 03-01-21
Excellent Narration
Glad I got past the opening segments— it’s not an endless narrative in that vein, rather a set a vignettes (so far) that made me laugh out loud.
The narrator is excellent- conveys the character behind the text. Really one of the best narrations I’ve heard, and even suits the locution of DFW’s speech.
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- Colin
- 11-05-16
Amazing writing.
David Foster Wallace is one of the few writers that can pull you in so deep. as long as you can stay with ham and maintain focus when he goes hyper realistic you will be rewarded. That being said it is difficult to always maintain that Focus. also he tends to go dark and sad and bleak so if you're trying to be positive and stay happy not always the best author. it is amazing his ability to sum up complex subjects such as the American zeitgeist, politics, and culture in a way that is easy to understand and profoundly demystifying in a weird way. David was the man.
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Overall
- Susan C. S.
- 07-01-11
A tour de force by the reader.
Fascinating book and a pitch-perfect reading. I listened twice. Robert Petkoff's reading has both a flow and a level of detail that makes the book comprehensible and intriguing. I bought the hard copy and looking at it, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it through. This is a gem.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Tony Walton
- 05-20-24
Breathtakingly Beautiful
Wallace’s finest work as a writer- and his most emotionally available writing. A beautiful portrait of gentle hum of anxiety in modern life
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- Darwin8u
- 10-31-16
The King is dead, long live the King!
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
If a novel about IRS examiners in a Midwest Regional Examination Center seems like a bad pitch, and definitely a boring novel, you will have almost grasped about one-half the magic of DFW. This is absolutely a novel about boredom, tedium, loneliness, isolation, bureaucracy, melancholy, and depression. Did I also mention this book is damn funny and absurd? I giggled at parts. I cried at parts. I cried and giggled at parts. There are books I love for their power. There are books I love for their art. Their are other books I love for their soul. I love this unfinished, rough and beautiful novel for everything.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Roman Turner
- 03-26-16
Exceptional
Great voice and compelling audio. Captures Wallace's voice and creates a work I think even in his perfectionist form would appreciate and approve of. Kudos
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