The Pale King
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The Pale King
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Narrated by:
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Robert Petkoff
About this listen
Downloadable audio edition of David Foster Wallace's final and most ambitious undertaking – an audacious and hilarious look into the abyss of ordinary life. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, IL, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace’s death, but it is a deeply intriguing and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions – questions of life’s meaning and of the ultimate value of work and family – through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace’s unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for a writer who dared to take on the most daunting subjects the human spirit can imagine.
©2011 David Foster-Wallace (P)2011 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 56
Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The beauty of the broken
- By SJ Evans on 04-27-18
By: Stephanie Kallos
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 160
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 132
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 133
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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Eat the Document
- By: Dana Spiotta
- Narrated by: Rachael Warren
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4 out of 5 stars 54
In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker - passionate, idealistic, and in love - design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her 15-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great ensemble piece!
- By Buyer009 on 08-08-17
By: Dana Spiotta
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The Coincidence Makers
- A Novel
- By: Yoav Blum
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 145
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4 out of 5 stars 127
What if the drink you just spilled, the train you just missed, or the lottery ticket you just found was not just a random occurrence? What if it's all part of a bigger plan? What if there's no such thing as a chance encounter? What if there are people we don't know determining our destiny? And what if they are even planning the fate of the world? Enter the Coincidence Makers - Guy, Emily, and Eric - three seemingly ordinary people who work for a secret organization devoted to creating and carrying out coincidences. What the rest of the world sees as random occurrences, are, in fact, carefully orchestrated events.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing!
- By Gal Wolff on 07-31-18
By: Yoav Blum
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 217
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 185
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Story4 out of 5 stars 184
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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Blind Lake
- By: Robert Charles Wilson
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 197
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 143
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 147
Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, "writes superior science fiction thrillers." His Darwinia won Canada's Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.
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2 out of 5 stars
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DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-22-15
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 72
It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 293
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 242
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 241
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Baltimore Blues
- Tess Monaghan, Book 1
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Deborah Hazlett
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,502
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1,202
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,194
Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent—including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety—and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée—make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence could prove costly to Tess.
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4 out of 5 stars
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I'm on #8 - This series is almost unique
- By connie on 02-19-12
By: Laura Lippman
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The Conspiracy Club
- By: Jonathan Kellerman
- Narrated by: Rob Kahn
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 202
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 94
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Story4 out of 5 stars 92
When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, Dr. Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise and warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work as staff psychologist at City Central Hospital, only to be drawn deeper into a waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn Banks.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Disappointin Departure
- By Tom on 12-03-03
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Road Dog
- Life and Reflections from the Road as a Stand-up Comic
- By: Dov Davidoff
- Narrated by: Dov Davidoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
Road Dog is comedian, actor, and writer, Dov Davidoff's unflinching memoir told through reflections of twelve months on the road. Davidoff travels across the country from college campuses to local theaters doing stand-up comedy and telling it like it is. He's been known to wax poetic about everything from encounters with large fake breasts, to people who have too many kids, to magnum condoms the size of CD cases. He is hilarious and relatable and will have you laughing at yourself in no time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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dark, real, & exceptional
- By Luis F Rodriguez on 11-22-17
By: Dov Davidoff
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Murphy's Boy
- By: Torey Hayden
- Narrated by: Loretta Rawlins
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.
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5 out of 5 stars
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want to meet Kevin
- By Cherish on 10-14-15
By: Torey Hayden
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Faces of the Gone
- Carter Ross, Book 1
- By: Brad Parks
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 364
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 317
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Story4 out of 5 stars 318
Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot: That's the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. Immediately dispatched to the scene, Carter learns that the four victims - an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler, and a mama's boy - came from different parts of the city and didn't seem to know one another.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wish Brad Parks were more prolific!!!!
- By shelley on 02-16-18
By: Brad Parks
What listeners say about The Pale King
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Maria Faurholm
- 03-12-15
Masterpiece
A work unlike any other. Rich figurative language and accounts of human thought and behavior. Petkoff makes it fresh and alive. Listener must succumb to Wallace's heavy world, but it ends up bringing you to a whole new realm of literature and intimacy. Cannot recommend it enough.
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