"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.