The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I'd not even been in my new place an entire day before I received a postcard from Kafka. 
I'd just gotten back from returning the rental truck when there was a knock at my apartment door. 
I made my way through the confusion of boxes and gave the peephole a quick look.

There was a middle-aged mailman slouching out in the hall.

"Where were you when I was hefting all my books upstairs?" I greeted him. "Better late than never, I guess. I could use some help dragging my futon around that corner, into the bedroom. I'd really appreciate they extra muscle."

David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King is going to be released in 2010. Little, Brown - his publisher - said it runs 'several hundred thousand words.' (Regular-size novels usually weigh in at about 75,000 words or so, I think.) The finished edition of Infinite Jest had 479,198 words, and is apparently the tenth-longest novel ever written.

It could have been so good.

That was the biggest disappointment - not how bad it was, but the discrepancy between its actual and potential levels of quality. I'm speaking (writing) of The Ballad of Josef K, a puppeted interpretation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, on stage now at the Illusion Theater.

Kill your darlings.

This is the command given young writers when they're learning to edit their stories and poems. (It usually comes directly after the first piece of advice for novice authors: Quit now.)