Something to Do with Paying Attention is a novella excerpted from The Pale King[1] and touted as David Foster Wallace's final work of fiction by The New Yorker.

[1] McNally also says this novella is "not just a complete story, but the best concrete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.

According to Jon Baskin, the New Yorker's reviewer of this novella, Wallace "left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage.

[2] In a 2022 review published by the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Russel Clark writes that the novella "has the rhythm of waves on a beach as high tide approaches: forward movement before pulling back, all the while inching farther up the sand",[3] and "For all his virtuosity, Wallace specialized in erudite neurotics from Middle America who suffer from various degrees of mental illness.

"[3] In a 2023 article for the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood called the novella "enthralling" and wrote: "It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs.