New Wallace fiction in the New Yorker
The latest issue of the New Yorker has a new excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.
Except that it’s not really new…Wallace did a reading of it back in 2000; the audio is available here. A comparison of the transcript of that reading and the “finished” version published in the NYer can be found here. (thx, @mattbucher)
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