This may be a temporary thing, but David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King appears to be shipping now from Amazon, more than two weeks ahead of the official tax day publication date. Update: From the official Pale King Facebook page: the book “doesn’t have a one day laydown: stores can sell it as soon as it’s in their shop.” So looks like the book is now available everywhere. Do you have your copy yet?
The Pale King Is Shipping
We’re Not In the Establishment. Right, Geoff?
In The Guardian, Geoff Dyer talks about about the literary establishment and how, in particular, “unspoken assumption that [it] – whatever it is – is a bad thing.”
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Oratory Passion
The best Fourth of July speech? Frederick Douglass delivered it on July 5, 1852. Pair with a reading list for July.
A Story of Decline
Last month, in a review for The Millions, Chris Barsanti called George Packer’s The Unwinding an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.” Now, in The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu calls the book “decent, meticulous and concerned,” though it could have benefited from the “roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.”
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Out There
As a cultural center with a very different makeup than the various home bases of the publishing world, Los Angeles often gets short shrift in discussions of literary cities. At the LARB (naturally), Sarah-Jane Stratford writes about the city’s importance to speculative literature, with an emphasis on the works of Ray Bradbury. Related: Tanjil Rashid on Bradbury’s Middle East connection.
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I have my copy, although it’s a review copy directly from the publisher. The ship date on my Amazon pre-order is supposedly today or tomorrow.
The ship date on mine is also today– for those in NYC and willing to resist the temptation of Amazon’s discounts, St. Mark’s Books was selling them last night…)
Wow, Hachette, way to screw independent bookstores (many of which are planning big release day parties for The Pale King) out of sales by shipping to Amazon first.
Rachel, as you’ll see from the comment above yours, it appears that Hachette shipped to ALL bookstores ahead of the listed pub date, including indies like St. Mark’s Books in NYC.
But the bookshops that announced release day events are still screwed; they have the copies, but likely would have sold more if there had been a true release date. So: What Rachel Said.
Dreezer, that is true. Hadn’t thought about that.
I work at an indie, and I understand our books shipped today and will be here next week. So yeah, we can sell before the 15th, but not as early as Amazon.
But do you think there are really many people buying it this early from Amazon who hadn’t already pre-ordered it and wouldn’t be buying it in-store anyway?