Beverly Hills, CA - PEN Center USA will present THE PALE KING: MONOLOGUES FROM THE UNFINISHED NOVEL BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills on April 28, 2011. Doors will open at 7p with a cocktail reception in the theatre’s rotunda.
The event will follow the April 15 release of The Pale King (Little, Brown and Company), which follows the lives of the agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois. The Pale King, as well as Wallace’s backlist titles will be available for purchase before and after the performance, courtesy of Skylight Books. The event will be hosted by Los Angeles Times book critic, David L. Ulin. PEN Center USA will release a list of performers in the coming weeks.
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois. He received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion, and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008, leaving behind unpublished work of which The Pale King is a part.
PEN Center USA, a literary non-profit based in Beverly Hills, has a membership of more than 800 professional writers. PEN Center USA strives to protect the rights of writers around the world, to stimulate interest in the written word, and to foster a vital literary community among the diverse writers living in the western United States. PEN Center USA has a long, successful history planning literary events in and around Los Angeles; special programming has taken place at The Hammer, Hotel Café, Largo at the Coronet, The Echo, Actor’s Gang, The Hammer, The Pacific Design Center, and The Beverly Hills Hotel.
Skylight Books is an independently owned, general-interest bookstore located in Los Feliz. They have sold thousands of copies of David Foster Wallace’s books, and have held several events for them, including a reading by the author himself. Infinite Jest is one of Skylight’s all-time bestselling titles.
