Probably! The Observer checks in with Bonnie Nadell, the writer’s first agent and literary executor, who confirms Wallace was working on a longer project — from which two recently published pieces, “Good People,” in The New Yorker, and “The Compliance Branch,” in Harper’s, were supposedly taken — before he died. “Have I read the larger thing? No. And I don’t think anyone’s gonna read it … Certainly, his wife is too distraught, and I have not gone through any of his papers … I don’t know what there is and what there isn’t.”
Offering further confirmation is Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch, who says, “When we put together the 10th anniversary for Infinite Jest two years ago, we had an event in New York and an event in Los Angeles, and I talked with him about whether he would like to come be part of them … I was not surprised to hear that he was wary of that idea. ‘I’ll do anything you want me to do,’ he said, ‘but please don’t ask me to do this, please, please, please. I’m working on something long and it takes me a long time to get back into it after I’m pulled away from it.’” Whether we’ll actually get to read it is, of course, another story.
David Foster Wallace Is Gone—Did He Leave Some ‘Larger Thing’? [NYO]
