Speaking of death and taxes: IRS funding was cut in the latest round of budget warfare, and what better way to celebrate than with a new book about IRS agents by the late David Foster Wallace? Skylight Books presents readings of Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King ($27.99, Little, Brown & Co.). Sponsored by Pen Center USA, the readings — by various celebrities, names of whom are oddly unavailable at press time — of passages from the book are hosted by staunch book critic and longtime Wallace champion David Ulin. The Pale King follows the lives of the agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, revealing them as feckless pawns in a master scheme of stupidity and tedium rather than malevolent harpies emblematic of worst-case scenarios consistently put forth by the Benevolent Association of Tinfoil and Fluoride Workers.

Thu., April 28, 7 p.m., 2011

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