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Early Stories

Slow Learner

Possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce... Sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language

Anything from the most monstrous talent in the post-war West should be pursued in earnest. I've eaten two copies already

Thomas Pynchon is the Gargantua of modern fiction... In Slow Learner he breaks cover for the first time with a remarkable open handed portrait of the writer as a young man

Intriguing material for Pynchon fans and critics

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is…we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. 
 
Thomas Pynchon’s literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V., but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here. In his introduction to Slow Learner, the author reviews his early work with disarming candour and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written 
 
‘Thomas Pynchon is the Gargantua of modern fiction... In Slow Learner he breaks cover for the first time with a remarkable open-handed portrait of the writer as a young man’ Sunday Times 
 
‘An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers’ New Republic 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

The Crying of Lot 49

The best American novel I have read since the war

For the reader who has yet to make acquaintance with this important comic talent. . . an appropriate introduction...defiantly, purposefully outrageous

The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most elegiac writing about America since Fitzgerald, as well as packing an intense metaphorical punch about revelation, hierophany, meaning and connection that is far too complex to reduce to precis

The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the massed wreckage of his civilization, 'a salad of despair'. That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero, is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And that is what this novel is.

A book of thundering originality and depth and lyricism, a book with the highest intellectual aspirations - and yet it also seemed to be concerned with creating genuine suspense

The Crying of Lot 49 is a highly accessible piece of literature filled with his [Pynchon's] signature humour, sharp wit and bizarre happenings

Oedipa Maas has been made executrix of her former lover’s estate. 
 
The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49. 
 
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the shortest of Pynchon’s great, dazzling novels – and one of his most iconic. 
 
‘The best American novel I have read since the war’ Frank Kermode 
 
‘Remarkable... The Crying of Lot 49 resembles metaphysical poetry in the range of its allusions and the curiosity of its creator’ Washington Post

To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason &amp; Dixon, and Against the Day, and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover

[Pynchon's] ambitions in V. are prodigious, enough to demand comparison less with Perelman than with the Joyce of the Circe episode of Ulysses

The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation

[Pynchon] writes richer comedy than most card-carrying comic novelists, filling his eight novels with hilarious spoofs, outlandish characters, screwball dialogue and zany scenarios

Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other

The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one

Mr Pynchon writes with enormous skill and virtuosity

Who, where or what is V.? 
 
Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists known as the ‘Whole Sick Crew’, all while Herbert Stencil looks to find the woman described in his father’s diary: ‘V.’ 
 
Sweeping through sixty years, meandering across the globe and brimming with madcap characters, V. is the bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious modern classic that introduced the world to the one-of-a-kind brilliance of Thomas Pynchon. 
 
'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian 
'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker

Bleeding Edge

Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire...

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left. 
 
Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her licence got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mum - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighbourhood - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. 
 
With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since. 
 
Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? 
 
Hey. Who wants to know?

Thomas Pynchon, America’s greatest novelist, has written the greatest novel about the most significant events in his country’s 21st century history. It is unequivocally a masterpiece.

It’s dense, complex and riotously, ridiculously funny.

The looming shadow of 9/11 touches every page. Nonetheless, many of those pages are outrageously funny, others are sexy, touchingly domestic, satirical or deeply mysterious. All are brilliantly written in Pynchon’s characteristically revved-up, even slightly over-revved style – a joy to read… Swarms with amazing characters… Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.

Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, is the best and most surprising thing he’s written since those great books… The jokes in this novel, incidentally, are superb, with the comic tone perhaps a career high point.

Part thriller, part detective story, it’s a vibrant portrait of a city on the cusp of change.

[Pynchon’s] eighth novel is something of a return to form, and could well be his best since his comeback… Offers a winning heroine, scintillating screwball dialogue and a typical host of weird, zany or depraved characters, this time corralled into a tighter-than-usual plot.

Entropic in its plottery and joyously paranoid in its world view… My advice: read it, but don’t try to follow it. It’ll make you giddy.

There’s plenty of space within the pattern for Pynchon’s trademark digressions…songs, terrible puns…and some magnificent set pieces.

Though Bleeding Edge doesn’t stint on leftish theorizing about far-right misdeeds, it also gives the sense that for the first time Pynchon is looking at things from a very great height, as a battle between toy soldiers.

The new novel by the reclusive Pynchon is set in New York in 2001 and follows a fraud investigator who takes on more than she bargains for when she checks out a billionaire internet tycoon.

[Pynchon’s] working towards a sort of metaphysics of our accelerated, encrypted world; he’s positing that once you reach a certain bandwidth, classical notions of space and time, and even maybe the unitary indivisible soul, break down.

Routinely extraordinary but also wonderfully funny, regularly gripping and, whisper it, engaging…

Beneath the constant wordplay and manic invention there’s serious intent; the intensity of Pynchon’s prose can be a demanding slog but stay the course and you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

Pynchon has a particular gift for apprehending a scene, for conveying the resonance of objects and understanding their role in our lives.

The narrative voice of Bleeding Edge is warmer: it’s omniscient and at times essayistic but more often casual, chatty and in the present tense. Pynchon has an almost fatherly fondness for his characters… He takes an obvious pleasure in the game: in his gags and obscurities, in storytelling, and in chronicling the wasted days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out.

Bleeding Edge is an elegiac yet compulsively readable novel. The humour crackles, eliciting chuckles on almost every page. No one works magic with words like Pynchon, and here he is at the height of his powers, by turns gripping, thought-provoking, inventive, touching and poetic, not to mention warmly human.

Pynchon makes interesting observations about life, there are lovely twists of lyricism throughout, the dialogue is punchy and believable, the jokes are funny.

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

Pynchon's best novel since Mason &amp; Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Gravity's Rainbow

A new edition to celebrate the 40th anniversary of first publication of Pynchon's classic book.

The best seller described as the kind of Ulysses which Joyce might have written if he had been a Boeing engineer with a fetish for quadrille paper

Thomas Pynchon gives us 20th-century fiction's finest memento mori.

I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, f*ck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel

Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation.

Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer.

Gravity's Rainbow is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted…[Pynchon’s] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels.

He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy.

Gravity's Rainbow is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated.

Thomas Pynchon’s more flamboyantly experimental mega-novel…

Thomas Pynchon was born in Long Island, USA in 1937. He took a scholarship at Cornell University and studied Engineering before switching to study English. He has served in the United States Navy and worked as a technical writer at Boeing. 
 
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow 
Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason &amp; Dixon. Against the Day, and most recently Inherent Vice. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Discover Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic. 
 
 ‘The greatest, wildest author of his generation’ Guardian 
 
We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it. 
 
Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As The Financial Times said, ‘you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.’ Forty years since its publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.

Inherent Vice

The legendary author of V and Gravity's Rainbow is back with a taut, psychedelic yarn, about the sixties, featuring private eye Doc Sportello...

Brilliant and brain boggling by turns

Inherent Vice works brilliantly as both a neon-lit noir and as a psychedelic lament to the Sixties

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

The intellectual game-play is characteristically dazzling...colourful and pleasurable

You don't have to have been there; if you're willing, he'll take you there

The pioneering work in a genre you'd have to call psychedelic Noir ...Who writes sentences as beautiful as Pynchon?

Pynchon leaves the rest of the American literary establishment at the starting gate...the range over which he moves is extraordinary, not simply in terms of ideas explored but also in the range of emotions he takes you through

The most important and mysterious writer of his generation

Throughout Pynchon's style is spot-on, capturing what Hunter S Thompson called the high, wild sound of the era, a sense of enthusiasm and boundless opportunity, even though you know the times are changing, and not necessarily in your favour...Pychon continues to draw his inspiration from genre fiction and pulp. Its more fun this way

Often very funny...may be his most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale

One of America's most wilful and obscure writers has produced the most enjoyable beach read of the summer

It is all a bit silly, really, but handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, is as much fun to read as anything you will come across this summer

Full of superb dialogue and lovely descriptive passages'

By far [Pynchon's] most accessible novel since The Crying of Lot 49, and at least as funny as his zany behemoth Against the Day...this is a loveable, kooky version of noir detective fiction, but with the shadows of genuine darkness at its edges...Inherent Vice is Pynchon on an idiosyncratic frolic, and what a joy it is. He is the only truly Dickensian talent of our time

True believers will be relieved to note, however, that despite its concessions to readability and fun, Inherent Vice has all the trademark Pynchon silliness...beneath all this mayhem and fun, however, Inherent Vice is a serious, even brooding, book

a bright, breezy, funny page-turner...Best of all, however, is the way Pynchon maps the psycho-geography and shifting socio-political sands of America at the time

Inherent Vice has more heart than any other Pynchon ... an anatomy or perhaps an astrology of hipness ... sun-kissed, psychedelic and sexually-enhanced, Pynchon has re-embodied, re-grooved the soul of the Sixties

Pynchon's pastiche is pitch-perfect, and extremely funny... the novel works superbly as a thriller. But we also get a brilliantly lurid snapshot of a world starting to unravel

The [novel's] sentences have their stately beauty, and Pynchon is poignantly good on the heartsick detective... There are tremendously pacy comic set pieces... and a nostalgic delight in 1960s types

Like all Pynchon's novels, short or long, it is an almost hermetically sealed world, which you can navigate best by surrendering to authorial sensibilities....Inherent Vice is Pynchon looking back at an era, caught up in its own stoned entropy, and looking back on himself...You don't have to have been there; if you're willing, he'll take you there

With his most accessible book  to date - half Chinatown, half Fear and loathing, all searing jeremiad about the modern American Soil - he may have  come up with something even th e British literati can read

[An] absorbing and frequently funny crime novel...unmistakably Pynchon; as funny, angry and wistful as ever

Handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, [this] is as much fun as anything you will come across this summer

The experience of reading the novel is probably as close to getting stoned as reading a novel can be. It brings on fits of the giggles and paranoia jags...It doesn't, however, make you fall asleep...characteristically hilarious and thought-provoking

Thomas Pynchon...blended Chandler-esque noir with pastoral comedy

Serves up the author's trademark blend of pop culture, conspiracy theories and quirky characters

Financial Times, Fiction Books of the Year

His most relaxed and enjoyable work since Gravity's Rainbow

Presiding genius of American weird fiction

A warm and joyous read. There is softness about this book, but also a tinge of melancholy

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon and, most recently, Against the Day. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Read the cult classic behind the major new film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin. 
 
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. 
 
It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. 
 
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there...or...if you were there, then you...or, wait, is it...

Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. 
 
By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. 
 
Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Thomas Pynchon

Books by Thomas Pynchon

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