The Crying of Lot 49

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

Spectator

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

Observer

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.

New York Times

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

Ned Beauman, Independent

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

Evening Standard