Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

David Foster Wallace is one of America's greatest writers.

It was an enormous tragedy when, three years ago, he took his own life, leaving behind an

unfinished novel, The Pale King.

The book was prepared for publication by his longtime editor and will be published tomorrow, April

15th, a date made significant by the fact that the book is about the IRS and the people who work there.

Today's program was recorded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, following a Lannin Foundation tribute

to David Foster Wallace. Now, on to my guess.

David Lipsky, who is the author of, although, of course, you end up becoming yourself, which is a record

and transcript of a road trip with David Foster Wallace when the book Infinite Jest was about to appear,

and Rick Moody, who not only was an admirer and friend of David's, he shares an editor with David.

The editor they share is Michael Peach, and I was a friend of David's and greatly honored to know him.

I'm going to begin by asking Rick to read the opening of the

pale king. Rick Moody. Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of can'ted rust,

and past the tobacco brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight, threw them on the water-down river, to the place beyond the windbreak where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the AM heat, Shattercane, lambs quarter, cut grass, sawbriar,

nutgrass, jimson weed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine cabbage, golden rod, creeping Charlie, butterprint, nightshade,

ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek.

...