Something to Do with Paying Attention: (McNally Editions)

David Foster Wallace's last, unfinished work, a wise and unexpected tour de force "using the IRS the way Borges used the lipary and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world." --John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ When David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a vast unfinished novel--some 1,100 pages of loose chapters, sketches, notes, and fragments. This material was collated and published in 2011 as The Pale King, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described "wastoid," adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law. It is, as Sarah McNally writes in her preface, "not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace's late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works."

About the Author :
Sarah McNally is the publisher of McNally Editions.

Review :
"First among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest . . . He was a wake-up artist." --George Saunders "Delicious . . . An unmistakably Wallace-esque tale of inanity and profundity." --Hillary Kelly, Vulture "Enthralling . . . Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of [Wallace's] best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest . . . You open [the] text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention." --Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books "Distinct in Wallace's work is an attention to the secret, battered, deflated spiritual existence of America and Americans. Underneath the professional smiles there is a sadness in this country that is sunk so deep in the culture you can taste it in your morning Cheerios . . . Wallace identified it: many, many people followed him." --Zadie Smith, The Burned Children of America "The final finished work by the late, widely influential novelist and essayist . . . Darkly fascinating. A valediction for Wallace's fans. Accountants will enjoy it, too." --Kirkus Reviews "David Foster Wallace captured a palpable truth almost indescribably profound about contemporary American life . . . Wallace, like few of his peers and few living writers, managed to depict the emptiness at the center of American culture . . . It was out of his sensitivity to the oddity of American life that Wallace was able to inject laugh-out-loud humor into [his] scenes . . . The new publication of Something To Do With Paying Attention . . . presents the perfect opportunity to revisit Wallace's major ideas, his stylistic choices, and the largely neglected political implications of his work . . . The transformation of Something To Do With Paying Attention's protagonist should serve as conversion testimony for a country that has become something of one big 'wastoid.'" --David Masciotra, CounterPunch "Complete in itself . . . [Something to Do with Paying Attention] has to be the most unusual conversion experience in confessional narrative." --Judith Shulevitz, Slate "Wallace was both satirist and preacher in the same breath, and the idea that the IRS, imagined as a quasi-religious foundation in which the burdensome and egotistic self might find redemption in the service of a greater good, could be both a comic conceit and a heartfelt belief seems to have been central to his conception of The Pale King." --Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books "The Pale King is light-years beyond Infinite Jest . . . Among many other things, the record of a struggle against all the things that 'boredom' comes to stand for in this novel: disengagement, distraction, isolation, an inability to feel." --Hari Kunzru, Financial Times "Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them . . . He was using the IRS the way Borges used the library and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world." --John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ