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| best thomas pynchon books: Slow Learner Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers. - New Republic Funny and wise enough to charm the gravity from a rainbow...All five of the pieces have unusual narrative vigor and inventiveness. - New York Times Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, Slow Learner showcases Thomas Pynchon’s writing before the publication of his first novel V. The stories compiled here are “The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration,” along with an introduction by Pynchon himself that Time magazine calls his first public gesture toward autobiography. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 The funniest book Pynchon has written. — Rolling Stone Entertainment of a high order. - Time Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. 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. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Letters of Wanda Tinasky Wanda Tinasky, 1996 |
| best thomas pynchon books: Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 Winner of the 1974 National Book Award The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II. - The New Republic “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Against the Day Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 “[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant.” —USA Today “Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling.” —The Boston Globe Spanning the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Vineland Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human. - Frank McConnell, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.” |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times “The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge. |
| best thomas pynchon books: V. Thomas Pynchon, 1999-04 Pynchon's V. won the coveted William Faulkner Foundation's First Novel Award when it appeared in 1963, and was hailed by Atlantic Review as one of the best works of the century. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring. - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature. - John Leonard, The Nation 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 reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Ninety-nine Novels Anthony Burgess, 1984 Anthony Burgess provides a cogent and passionate argument for each of the books on this controversial, stimulating list. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon, 2014-08-26 Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best. - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous. - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. 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, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know? |
| best thomas pynchon books: Women and Men Joseph McElroy, 2023-01-17 Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Alnilam James Dickey, 1987-06-01 The eagerly awaited new work from James Dickey, his first novel since the brilliant Deliverance. Alnilam is a startling rite of passage through the worlds of darkness and sight, a stunning portrait of one blind man's quest to learn the truth of his son's disappearance during World War II, a story told partly in parallel columns describing both the blind man's perceptions and the point of view of seeing characters. Esquire excerpt. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, Brian McHale, 2012 This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Players Don DeLillo, 2012-03-28 In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their ideal life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory satisfaction than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple.... And still they remain untouched, players indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create. Originally published in 1977 (before his National Book Award-winning White Noise and the recent blockbuster Underworld), Players is a fast-moving yet starkly drawn socially critical drama that demonstrates the razor-sharp prose and thematic density for which DeLillo is renowned today. The wit, elegance and economy of Don DeLillo's art are equal to the bitter clarity of his perceptions.--New York Times Book Review |
| best thomas pynchon books: Warlock Oakley Hall, 2014-08-05 Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall. —Thomas Pynchon |
| best thomas pynchon books: Stone Junction Jim Dodge, 2009-10-08 When Daniel's mother dies, he is brought under the protection of the AMO: the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. It is an introduction to a world of revenge, revolution and mind-bending chemicals, where anarchists, alchemists and high-stake gamblers co-exist. It is a place in which magic and murder are the norm. So begins an extraordinary quest for knowledge and understanding in this unforgettable outlaw classic. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Pynchon, the Voice of Ambiguity Thomas H. Schaub, 1981 |
| best thomas pynchon books: Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History David Cowart, 2012-01-15 Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that anticipate--with humor, insight, and cogency--much that has emerged in the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David Cowart, Pynchon's most profound teachings are about history--history as myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities. In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. Examining Pynchon's entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging, metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence of German culture in Pynchon's early work, with particular emphasis on Gravity's Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon's place in literary history. Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling--not to mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History offers a deft analysis of the problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and argues for the continuity of Pynchon's historical vision. |
| best thomas pynchon books: XXXXX Xxxxx, Martin Howse, 2006 xxxxx proposes a radical, new space for artistic exploration, with essential contributions from a diverse range of artists, theorists, and scientists. Combining intense background material, code listings, screenshots, new translation, [the] xxxxx [reader] functions as both guide and manifesto for a thought movement which is radically opposed to entropic contemporary economies. xxxxx traces a clear line across eccentric and wide ranging texts under the rubric of life coding which can well be contrasted with the death drive of cynical economy with roots in rationalism and enlightenment thought. Such philosophy, world as machine, informs its own deadly flipside embedded within language and technology. xxxxx totally unpicks this hiroshimic engraving, offering an dandyish alternative by way of deep examination of software and substance. Life coding is primarily active, subsuming deprecated psychogeography in favour of acute wonderland technology, wary of any assumed transparency. Texts such as Endonomadology, a text from celebrated biochemist and chaos theory pioneer Otto E. Roessler, who features heavily throughout this intense volume, make plain the sadistic nature and active legacy of rationalist thought. At the same time, through the science of endophysics, a physics from the inside elaborated here, a delicate theory of the world as interface is proposed. xxxxx is very much concerned with the joyful elaboration of a new real; software-led propositions which are active and constructive in eviscerating contemporary economic culture. xxxxx embeds Perl Routines to Manipulate London, by way of software artist and Mongrel Graham Harwood, a Universal Dovetailer in the Lisp language from AI researcher Bruno Marchal rewriting the universe as code, and self explanatory Pornographic Coding from plagiarist and author Stewart Home and code art guru Florian Cramer. Software is treated as magical, electromystical, contrasting with the tedious GUI desktop applications and user-led drudgery expressed within a vast ghost-authored literature which merely serves to rehearse again and again the demands of industry and economy. Key texts, which well explain the magic and sheer art of programming for the absolute beginner are published here. Software subjugation is made plain within the very title of media theorist Friedrich Kittler's essay Protected Mode, published in this volume. Media, technology and destruction are further elaborated across this work in texts such as War.pl, Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War, again from Kittler, and Simon Ford's elegant take on J.G Ballard's crashed cars exhibition of 1970, A Psychopathic Hymn. Software and its expansion stand in obvious relation to language. Attacking transparency means examining the prison cell or virus of language; life coding as William Burrough's cutup. And perhaps the most substantial and thorough-going examination is put forward by daring Vienna actionist Oswald Wiener in his Notes on the Concept of the Bio-adapter which has been thankfully unearthed here. Equally, Olga Goriunova's extensive examination of a new Russian literary trend, the online male literature of udaff.com provides both a reexamination of culture and language, and an example of the diversity of xxxxx; a diversity well reflected in background texts ranging across subjects such as Leibniz' monadology, the ur-crash of supreme flaneur Thomas de Quincey and several rewritings of the forensic model of Jack the Ripper thanks to Stewart Home and Martin Howse. xxxxx liberates software from the machinic, and questions the transparency of language, proposing a new world view, a sheer electromysticism which is well explained with reference to the works of Thomas Pynchon in Friedrich Kittler's essay, translated for the first time into English, which closes xxxxx. Further contributors include Hal Abelson, Leif Elggren, Jonathan Kemp, Aymeric Mansoux, and socialfiction.org. |
| best thomas pynchon books: V. Thomas Pynchon, 2012-06-13 This work may well stand as one of the very best works of the century. —Atlantic Review [A] brilliant and turbulent first novel. —George Plimpton, New York Times Book Review The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men—one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose—and “V.,” the unknown woman of the title. Pynchon's debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists in New York known as the Whole Sick Crew along with his sidekick Pig Bodine, and the plot of Herbert Stencil, looking to find the woman he knows only as she is described in his father's diary: V. Brimming with madcap characters, the novel meanders from New York to Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, and Africa, and traverses generations. Time magazine raves, Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Thomas Pynchon Joseph W. Slade, 1990 This pioneering work, first published in 1974, is still regarded as the best introduction to the fiction of America's premier novelist. Six chapters explore the themes of Pynchon's short fiction, V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, while a section added especially for this edition extends the assessment of the author's stature and impact on modern literature. The book is particularly helpful to those readers interested in Pynchon's encyclopedic approach to writing, since Slade clearly identifies the cultural, technological, and scientific elements woven into the novels. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Deadly Sins , 1996 Who among us has not enjoyed a sin or two? Here are eight of the best present-day writers, discoursing on their favorite transgressions. (Even though Saint Thomas Aquinas only spoke of seven deadly sins, Joyce Carol Oates wanted to explore Despair.) Without guilt, readers can partake as the authors energetically defend Anger, Lust, Pride, and more. Line drawings. 2-color throughout. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Small Rain Thomas Pynchon, 1982 |
| best thomas pynchon books: Gerald's Party Robert Coover, 1997 Probes the personalities assembled at a party when the murder of a guest named Ros transforms an ordinary evening. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Understanding Thomas Pynchon Robert D. Newman, 1986 This volume provides instruction in how to read Thomas Pynchon--how to identify his material, themes, use of language, point of view, structure, symbolism, and responses to experience. Newman examines Pynchon's short fiction and presents close readings of his three novels. He reviews recent criticism, tracks the complex, fluid states of Pynchon's fiction, and etablishes the place of individual works in the canon. He also discusses the methods of representation--mixed modes, wordplay, parody, and burlesque--that Pynchon deploys to encapsulate meanings. Newman argues that Pynchon's novels undermine their own fictionality in order to encode meanings that implicate the reader in social and political issues. ISBN 0-87249-485-3: $15.95. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Nix Nathan Hill, 2017-01-26 'The best new writer of fiction in America. The best.' – John Irving 'The best thing a reviewer can do when faced with a novel of this calibre and breadth is to urge you to read it for yourselves.' – The Guardian Nathan Hill's brilliant debut, The Nix, journeys from the rural Midwest of the 1960s, to New York City during Occupy Wall Street; from Chicago in 1968, to wartime Norway: home of the mysterious Nix. Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, in decades, not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy. Now she has suddenly reappeared, having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a divided America. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she's facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel's help. As Samuel begins to excavate his mother's, and his country's, history, he will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about her - a woman with an epic story of her own, a story she has kept hidden from the world. 'Outstanding' – John Boyne, The Irish Times |
| best thomas pynchon books: A Gravity's Rainbow Companion Steven C. Weisenburger, 2011-03-15 Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty Great Books of the Twentieth Century. |
| best thomas pynchon books: U and I Nicholson Baker, 1992-02-04 Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Mordew Alex Pheby, 2020-08-13 GOD LIES DEFEATED, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew.On the surface, the streets of this the sea-battered city are slick with the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns - creatures that die and are swept down from the Merchant Quarter by the brooms of the workers and relentless rains, where they rot in the slums.There, a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud - until one day his mother, desperate and starving, sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew.The Master derives his power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength – and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. If only Nathan can discover how to use it.So it is that the Master begins to scheme against him - and Nathan has to fight his way through the betrayals, secrets, and vendettas of the city where God was murdered, and darkness reigns...WELCOME TO MORDEW – THE FIRST IN A FANTASTIC NEW TRILOGY FROM THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE-SHORTLISTED WRITER, ALEX PHEBY. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Complete Cosmicomics Italo Calvino, 2014-09-16 The complete collection of “nimble and often hilarious” short stories exploring the cosmos by the acclaimed author of Invisible Cities (Colin Dwyer, NPR). Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Relating complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world, they are an indelible and delightful literary achievement. Originally published in Italian in three separate volumes—including the Asti d’Appello Prize-winning first volume, Cosmicomics—these thirty-four dazzling stories are collected here in one definitive English-language anthology. “Trying to describe such a diverse and entertaining mix, I have to admit, just as Calvino does so often, that my words fail here, too. There’s no way I—or anyone, really—can muster enough of them to quite capture the magic of these stories . . . Read this book, please.” —Colin Dwyer, NPR |
| best thomas pynchon books: Mortality and Mercy in Vienna Thomas Pynchon, 1979 |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon David Seed, 1988-06-18 |
| best thomas pynchon books: Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon Molly Hite, 2015-12-18 Somewhere near the beginning of this incisive critical study of perhaps the most elusive and, to some minds, structurally disordered of living writers, Molly Hite notes that the idea of order has always fascinated novelists. She attributes this to the genre's being a hybrid, committed as it is, on the one hand, to a rigorous teleology in which events exist for the sake of resolution, and, on the other, to imitating a world that stubbornly refuses to add up. The teleological impetus of narrative, she notes, reflects a God-ordered universe, while the mimetic tendency describes a man-centered world. And because the two world views are irreconcilable, they pose a dilemma-the dilemma that Pynchon treats satirically in his three novels: that the alternative to theology is paranoia. In confronting his characters with evidence that either a transcendent power imposes order on the world, or that, in the absence of such a power, all order is illusory, Pynchon parodies a postromantic attitude that takes these extremes as exhaustive. The worlds that Pynchon projects in his three novels-V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow-are complex and difficult to negotiate; but they are not, Dr. Hite insists, incoherent. And even when they are most bizarre and surreal, they are familiar; for they evoke a multilayered reality in which multiple means of putting things together manage to coexist without ever resolving into a single, definitive system of organization. By placing thematic concerns within the context of Pynchon's experiments with narrative structure and voice, and in this way helping to correct the imbalance that has tended to minimize such formal features, Dr. Hite leads to an increased understanding of Pynchon's spectacle of a postreligious society committed to a vision of apocalypse. Molly Hite is assistant professor of English literature at Cornell University. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Shrouded Secrets Joel T. McGrath, 2010-12-02 When a teenage brother and sister inherit secret metaphysical powers, they are unknowingly hunted by a group of clandestine immortals. While one of the siblings will reluctantly choose the path of righteousness, the other will defiantly dabble with the promise of true power and the darkness that accompanies it. As David James begins his freshman year of high school, he learns that his older sister Danielle's popularity isn't genetic. However, their lives change dramatically with the discovery that they possess power which grants them vast unearthly abilities. The more they strive for reasonable normality, the more unstable their powers become when combined with the stresses of high school teenage life.While jealously, love, and anger unhinge their once typical lives, temptations to abuse their newfound gifts are manipulated by a shrouded and unyielding adversary who seeks to cast earth into a modern dark age. Soon secrets will injure the ones they love as the burden of true power begins to isolate them. Not even the ominous prospect of a crumbling world matters when each of them finds that they are helpless to control their own desires.Shrouded Secrets is an imaginative story in which David and Danielle James encounter the realm Eruditus. It is there they are taught to employ powers of the Artifex. The Galinea, knighted protectors of Eruditus, have those among them who have gone rogue. These malcontents, known as the Shroud, have set their sights on the two siblings. A perilous adventure ensues as David and Danielle become entangled with enemies who seek to claim their very lives. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The Lost Scrapbook Evan Dara, 1998 Author's first novel takes place in a community in modern America --Back cover. |
| best thomas pynchon books: The New Pynchon Studies Joanna Freer, 2019-05-09 The essays in this collection are at the forefront of Pynchon studies, representing distinctively twenty-first century approaches to his work. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Richard Farina, 1996-05-01 A witty, psychedelic, and telling novel of the 1960s Richard Fariña evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering-among other things-mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the Trade Paperback edition. |
| best thomas pynchon books: Conversations with James Joyce James Joyce, Arthur Power, 1982 |
| best thomas pynchon books: A Journey Into the Mind of Watts Thomas Pynchon, 1973 |
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Oct 20, 2016 · I like you best. I like chocolate best, better than anything else. can be used when what one is choosing from is not specified. I like you the best. Between chocolate, vanilla, and …
articles - "it is best" vs. "it is the best" - English Language ...
Jan 2, 2016 · This is the best car in the garage. We use articles like the and a before nouns, like car. The word "best" is an adjective, and adjectives do not take articles by themselves. …
expressions - "it's best" - how should it be used? - English …
Dec 8, 2020 · 3 "It's best (if) he (not) buy it tomorrow." is not a subjunctive form, and some options do not work well. 3A It's best he buy it tomorrow. the verb tense is wrong with 3A. Better would …
word choice - "his best-seller book" or "his best-selling book ...
Jun 12, 2016 · @J.R. If something is a New York Times Best Seller, the whole five word string is the adjective in use to modify book, although why book is specified is beyond me; perhaps to …
Word choice - Way of / to / for - Way of / to / for - English …
Jun 16, 2020 · The best way to use "the best way" is to follow it with an infinitive. However, this is not the only way to use the phrase; "the best way" can also be followed by of with a gerund: …
plural forms - It's/I'm acting in your best interest/interests ...
Dec 17, 2014 · have someone's (best) interests at heart (=want to help them): He claims he has only my best interests at heart. be in someone's/something's (best) interest(s) (=bring an …
"Best regards" vs. "Best Regards" - English Language Learners …
Dec 28, 2013 · The rule for formal letters is that only the first word should be capitalized (i.e. "Best regards"). Emails are less formal, so some of the rules are relaxed. That's why you're seeing …
Would be or will be - English Language Learners Stack Exchange
Oct 1, 2019 · It indicates items that (with the best understanding) are going to happen. Would is a conditional verb form. It states that something happens based on something else. Sometimes …
What is the correct usage of "deems fit" phrase?
Nov 15, 2016 · This plan of creating an electoral college to select the president was expected to secure the choice by the best citizens of each state, in a tranquil and deliberate way, of the …
difference - "What was best" vs "what was the best"? - English …
Oct 18, 2018 · On the linked page, best is used as an adverb, modifying the verb knew. In that context, the phrase the best can also be used as if it were an adverb. The meaning is …
adverbs - About "best" , "the best" , and "most" - English …
Oct 20, 2016 · I like you best. I like chocolate best, better than anything else. can be used when what one is choosing from is not specified. I like you the best. Between chocolate, vanilla, and …
articles - "it is best" vs. "it is the best" - English Language ...
Jan 2, 2016 · This is the best car in the garage. We use articles like the and a before nouns, like car. The word "best" is an adjective, and adjectives do not take articles by themselves. …
expressions - "it's best" - how should it be used? - English …
Dec 8, 2020 · 3 "It's best (if) he (not) buy it tomorrow." is not a subjunctive form, and some options do not work well. 3A It's best he buy it tomorrow. the verb tense is wrong with 3A. Better would …
word choice - "his best-seller book" or "his best-selling book ...
Jun 12, 2016 · @J.R. If something is a New York Times Best Seller, the whole five word string is the adjective in use to modify book, although why book is specified is beyond me; perhaps to …
Word choice - Way of / to / for - Way of / to / for - English …
Jun 16, 2020 · The best way to use "the best way" is to follow it with an infinitive. However, this is not the only way to use the phrase; "the best way" can also be followed by of with a gerund: …
plural forms - It's/I'm acting in your best interest/interests ...
Dec 17, 2014 · have someone's (best) interests at heart (=want to help them): He claims he has only my best interests at heart. be in someone's/something's (best) interest(s) (=bring an …
"Best regards" vs. "Best Regards" - English Language Learners …
Dec 28, 2013 · The rule for formal letters is that only the first word should be capitalized (i.e. "Best regards"). Emails are less formal, so some of the rules are relaxed. That's why you're seeing …
Would be or will be - English Language Learners Stack Exchange
Oct 1, 2019 · It indicates items that (with the best understanding) are going to happen. Would is a conditional verb form. It states that something happens based on something else. Sometimes …
What is the correct usage of "deems fit" phrase?
Nov 15, 2016 · This plan of creating an electoral college to select the president was expected to secure the choice by the best citizens of each state, in a tranquil and deliberate way, of the …
