David Foster Wallace's new book begins as a short story from our archives

As announced in The Millions today, David Foster Wallace’s unfinished manuscript begins with lines originally published as a short story in our own TriQuarterly Fall-Winter 2002. Here is the first paragraph of that story:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother's hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

The book follows several recruits joining an IRS tax return processing office in Peoria, Illinois, as they trade their souls for tedium. In his review, Jonathan Segura of Publishers Weekly writes:

It is…one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace, being, as it is, a transfixing and hyper-literate descent into relentless, inescapable despair.

And:

While it's hard not to wince at each of the many mentions of suicide, Wallace is often achingly funny; a passage that begins "I have only one real story about shit. But it's a doozy" and ends with a "prison-type gang-type sexual assault gone wrong" is pants-pissingly hilarious.

The Pale King will be released next month by Little, Brown.