Best of 2025_1

Podcast

What were the best books of 2025?

WTSR Thomas Pynchon

Features

Where to start reading Thomas Pynchon

epigraphs-2-main-image-1800x120020copy.jpg

Why you should always read the epigraph

Shadow Ticket

A private eye is catapulted on to a continent-hopping journey that proves difficult to escape‘A masterpiece… A vintage tale of adventure’ Daily Telegraph‘Swing bands, spies and surreal danger… A wild ride’ i Paper‘Brilliant fun… Rollicking’ Washington PostMilwaukee, 1932. Private eye Hicks McTaggart 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.By the time Hicks catches up with her in Hungary he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them.Surrounded by history he 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 he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee, and the normal world, is another question.‘Late Pynchon at his finest’ Los Angeles Times‘So alive, so pleasurable’ Megan Nolan‘Grabs you by the collar’ New York Times

Pynchon’s gift has always been his ability to render America in its full strangeness . . . The book is full of exuberance. Pynchon’s sentences themselves are so alive, so pleasurable . . . The fact that Shadow Ticket is brilliant and prescient isn’t a surprise; that it exudes so much joy and sensuousness is

A living literary legend returns with a masterpiece. Featuring private eyes, Nazis and Soviets, Shadow Ticket reads like a vintage tale of adventure

Brilliant fun . . . Rollicking . . . Pynchon’s prose is still as balletically dazzling as the trick shot Lew teaches Hicks . . . It’s not just that no one else writes quite like Pynchon; it’s that no one even tries

Pynchon’s livewire prose hops from subject to subject, joins the dots and makes patterns . . . [The novel] sets out with a song in its heart and mischievous spring in its step, but it edges into darkness

A 1930s detective tale with a sucker punch ending . . . Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance – and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open

Private eye Hicks McTaggart navigat[es] a world of swing bands, spies and surreal danger. A wild, genre-mashing ride from an elusive literary mind

The American great returns . . . It’s the Great Depression, and private eye Hicks McTaggart takes on a routine case that turns out to be anything but: think spies, swing musicians, interplanetary languages and paranormal intrigue

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

His fiction is comic, broad, and frequently surreal, but its underlying aim is nothing less than to represent ourselves to ourselves . . . Pynchon’s books, for all their wizardry and social and political insight, are fun . . . Once you’re in, you won’t want to get out

Grab[s] you by the collar . . . Remember his genre parodies, his outrageous names (howdy, Zoltán von Kiss), his ornate zingers, his lollygagging but frequently hilarious descriptions? It’s all here in this supercharged noir – a Chandleresque yarn involving a missing heiress and a disaster-prone private eye

New York Times, 27 Books Coming in October

Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon’s powers remain undiminished

Shadow Ticket is pleasingly twisty and packed with snappy repartee

Shadow Ticket exists in a glorious state of flux – the shadow of what, a ticket to where?... the tale flits through a dreamy wonderland that invokes unreliable memories of every Hammett, every Chandler, every film noir ever made… Happily, worryingly, Shadow Ticket is a hoot

A noir caper novel… This is Pynchon at his very best

All the colours of the Pynchon rainbow… a swaggering, hard-boiled caper set in a 1930s US toying with fascism

A literary triumph . . . I’m delighted to report that Shadow Ticket is a gloriously language-driven detective novel that waits for no one

Pynchon-heads, this one’s for us . . . His most urgent novel yet . . . Despite the intensity of his subject matter, Pynchon remains hilarious

Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control

Bombs, xenophobic spies, champagne cocktails, motorcycle gangs, jazz critics, and cult leaders abound . . . It’s impossible not to project the parallels of the creeping fascism in 1930s America in Shadow Ticket onto our current political climate . . . Pynchon knows how to drive his readers towards deluded suspicion. No one is free from paranoia when the world descends into chaos

A swaggering, hard-boiled caper . . . This is Pynchon’s genius: what seems ridiculous at first glance might just also be a faithful rendering of earnest American culture

Many of Shadow Ticket’s pleasures come from immersion in its period . . . But most impressive is the language, a mix of authentic slang and Pynchon’s own coinages that makes every page a joy and just demands to be noted and recited

A long-running theme in Pynchon’s work as a whole – how we’ve ended up where we are – as he has traced modern history . . . It’s Pynchon’s portrayal of human relationships that really shines in Shadow Ticket . . . Shadow Ticket’s final pages seem to be saying that even after all the grand events happening on the world stage, it all comes back to simple human relationships and the everyday hopes and dreams of the young

[Shadow Ticket] is fun, and it is comedy in the way that only comedy can be genuinely insightful… [and have a] capacity to move

Pynchon fans have had to wait more than ten years for this typically freewheeling yarn… a welcome reminder of an idiosyncratic talent

Shadow Ticket offers everything many of us have learned we can’t find anywhere quite so happily as in Pynchon. It’s funny and absorbing. It’s populated by wild characters… [It] seems one of Pynchon’s most heartfelt novels

A living literary legend, now 88, returns with a masterpiece

Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year 2025*

What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous… What’s unfathomable is how he does it: wherever Pynchon drops his pin, he seems to know the place, and the time, in every detail, with street-level precision

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

Milwaukee, 1932. Private eye Hicks McTaggart 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.By the time Hicks catches up with her in Hungary he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them.Surrounded by history he 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 he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee, and the normal world, is another question.

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.

Gravity’s Rainbow will deeply reward any intelligent reader’s focus. It’s a singularly miraculous achievement of post-war literature

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 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...

Mason & Dixon

A hugley ambitious, epic work from this most inventive and creative author.

Pynchon's finest work yet...if anyone is still looking for the Great American Novel...then this may well be it

A rollicking, picaresque tale... playful, erudite and funny

Very grand and mad and beautiful...I can't remember ever having reviewed a more original novel... and if America produces a novel to come near this marvellous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it

Pynchon offers readers a trip as long and full of yearning as that of his heroes

A hugely ambitous epic...show cases all of Mr Pynchon's gifts as a writer: his magical abilty to fuse history and fable, science and science fiction; his Swiftean grasp of satire and his vaudevillian's sense of farce. It's a book that testifies to his remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller... as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring

Achingly funny and infuriatingly erudite, every page so effortlessly well-constructed it made me want to give up writing

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

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse. 
 
We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Against the Day

'All that is glorious and exhilarating about Pynchon is found here... a mighty novel that will delight Pynchonians and seduce newcomers' - Observer.

A fine example of a successful marriage between the popular and intellectual, between fiction and science... gloriously, demandingly, daringly, Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time - you'll agree its worth it

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

Against the Day is a rollercoaster ride that soars, plummets and often loops the loop.... A fantastic chronicle of how the world came into being... there is a beautifully humane, compassionate energy arcing through the book...Pynchon is the only living American author who unreservedly deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature

It is a serious book and the finest thing Pynchon has done since Gravity's Rainbow. It should be acknowledged, nonetheless that Against The Day is immensely funny, an intricate, wheezing shaggy dog joke holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat

It is brilliant...There's a wonderful gathering tenderness - and Pynchon writes some of the most beautiful sentences you are ever likely to come across

Now aged 70 [Pynchon's] astonishing sense of place is undiminished...That such a heavy book should bear such a light-hearted message is one final irony - yet another example of Pynchon's wayward brilliance

Expertly spoofing Victorian pulp and western dime novels, as well as paying tribute to more contemporary genres..the tone is pitched a a generally jaunty angle to the apocalyptic subject matter, and whatever drawbacks of this it certainly keeps the book moving at a good clip

Heart-stopping felicities of description lurk around every corner

Pynchon can be totally maddening, but he has a great sense of mischief

Clever and inventive in a mad professor kind of way...Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry

A fast elasticism running from slangy to stately, a voice full of echoes, littered with jokes and songs, and often reaching into a curious tenderness, a tone of laid back elegy.... this amazing writer continues to be amazing, and in much the same way he always was

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

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York; from London to Venice, to Siberia, to Mexico during the revolution; silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. 
 
It is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what the world might be.

Thomas Pynchon

A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home

Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition

A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s

His descriptive powers are breathtaking...Pynchon proves once again to be the master of what might be called the highbrow conspiracy thriller

One of the funniest, most cleverly written, superbly characterised and beautifully structured books that I have read by a living author

How this book towers...it is a political novel in the ambitious, exuberant, powerfully serious mode of The Satanic Verses..It is funny, very funny

Thomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of America's countercultural dream 
 
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. 
 
Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.), Vineland is vintage Pynchon. 
 
'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie

Thomas Pynchon

Praise for Vineland

A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home

Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition

A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s

A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home

Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition

A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s

A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home

Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition

A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s

Books by Thomas Pynchon

Articles featuring Thomas Pynchon

What were the best books of 2025?

Where to start reading Thomas Pynchon

Why you should always read the epigraph

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter