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The Pale King

Author(s): David Foster Wallace

Location(s): Peoria

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1980s

Location

Content

The Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutiae of a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life.

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Rich and substantial and alive . . . Wallace’s finest work as a novelist (Time )

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