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| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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.” |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Vineland Thomas Pynchon, 1997-09-01 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. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, 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.). 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Vineland Thomas Pynchon, 1992 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. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, 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 thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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? |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Thomas Pynchon in Context Inger H. Dalsgaard, 2019-06-20 Thomas Pynchon in Context guides students, scholars and other readers through the global scope and prolific imagination of Pynchon's challenging, canonical work, providing the most up-to-date and authoritative scholarly analyses of his writing. This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Times and Places', sets out the history and geographical contexts both for the setting of Pynchon's novels and his own life. The second, 'Culture, Politics and Society', examines twenty important and recurring themes which most clearly define Pynchon's writing - ranging from ideas in philosophy and the sciences to humor and pop culture. The final part, 'Approaches and Readings', outlines and assesses ways to read and understand Pynchon. Consisting of Forty-four essays written by some of the world's leading scholars, this volume outlines the most important contexts for understanding Pynchon's writing and helps readers interpret and reference his literary work. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Study Guide Supersummary, 2019-10-06 SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature. This 32-page guide for the short story Entropy by Thomas Pynchon includes detailed a summary and analysis, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis. Featured content includes commentary on major characters, 15 important quotes, essay topics, and key themes like The Shadow of War and Mass Destruction and Closed Systems and Communication Breakdown. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Carsick John Waters, 2014-06-03 Carsick is the New York Times bestselling chronicle of a cross-country hitchhiking journey with America's most beloved weirdo. John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin mustache, and a cardboard sign that reads I'm Not Psycho, he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash? Before he leaves for this bizarre adventure, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road? His real-life rides include a gentle eighty-one-year-old farmer who is convinced Waters is a hobo, an indie band on tour, and the perverse filmmaker's unexpected hero: a young, sandy-haired Republican in a Corvette. Laced with subversive humor and warm intelligence, Carsick is an unforgettable vacation with a wickedly funny companion—and a celebration of America's weird, astonishing, and generous citizenry. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: The Small Rain Thomas Pynchon, 1982 |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Long Players Peter Coviello, 2018-06-05 ARTFORUM Ten Best Books of 2018 “Sad, joyous, funny, heart-cracking: I can’t remember the last time I read a book that rendered such raw feeling with such intricate intelligence.” —Gayle Salamon, ARTFORUM “A beautiful book. Deeply personal and yet entirely universal. . . A travelogue through the landscape of a broken heart.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat Pray Love A passionate, heartfelt story about the many ways we fall in love: with books, bands and records, friends and lovers, and the families we make. Have you ever fallen in love—exalting, wracking, hilarious love—with a song? Long Players is a book about that everyday kind of besottedness—and, also, about those other, more entangling sorts of love that songs can propel us into. We follow Peter Coviello through his happy marriage, his blindsiding divorce, and his fumbling post marital forays into sex and romance. Above all we travel with him as he calibrates, mix by mix and song by song, his place in the lives of two little girls, his suddenly ex-stepdaughters. In his grief, he considers what keeps us alive (sex, talk, dancing) and the limitless grace of pop songs. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Pynchon's California Scott McClintock, John Miller, 2014-11-01 Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009). Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: All Tomorrow's Parties William Gibson, 2003-02-04 “The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible... |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: How German Is It Walter Abish, 1980-11-17 Ulrich Hargenau testifies against fellow members of a German terrorist group in order to save himself and his wife, Paula, and contemplates the nature of his German heritage. The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Würtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, How German am l?––as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula's, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father's selfless heroism. Through Ulrich––privileged, upper class––we confront the incongruities of the new democratic Germany, in particular the flourishing community of Brumholdstein, named after the country's greatest thinker, Brumhold, and built on the former site of a concentration camp. Paula's participation in the destruction of a police station; the State's cynical response to crush the terrorists; two attempts on Ulrich's life; the discovery in Brumholdstein of a mass grave of death camp inmates––all these, with subtle irony, are presented as pieces of a puzzle spelling out the turmoil of a society's endeavor to avoid the implications of its menacing heritage. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000-03-07 THE MIND-BENDING CULT CLASSIC ABOUT A HOUSE THAT’S LARGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ON THE OUTSIDE • A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel. ''Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious. —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless. —Bret Easton Ellis, bestselling author of American Psycho “This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore.” —Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices, the story remains unchanged. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games. Neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of the impossibility of their new home, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Conspiracy Culture Dr Peter Knight, Peter Knight, 2013-04-15 Conspiracy theories are everywhere in post-war American culture. From postmodern novels to The X-Files and from gangsta rap to feminist polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delusions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in which everything is connected but nothing adds up. Peter Knight provides an engaging and cogent analysis of the development of conspiracy culture, from 1960s' countercultural suspicions about the authorities to the 1990s, where a paranoid attitude is both routine and ironic. Conspiracy Culture analyses conspiracy narratives about familiar topics like the Kennedy assassination, alien abduction, body horror, AIDS, crack cocaine, the New World Order, as well as more unusual ones like the conspiracies of patriarchy and white supremacy. Conspiracy Culture shows how Americans have come to distrust not only the narratives of the authorities, but even the authority of narrative itself to explain What Is Really Going On. From the complexities of Thomas Pynchon's novels to the endless mysteries of The X-Files, Knight argues that contemporary conspiracy culture is marked by an infinite regress of suspicion. Trust no one, because we have met the enemy and it is us. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Running Dog Don DeLillo, 2011-08-19 Moll Robbins is a journalist in a rut. But she gets wind of a very exciting story: it concerns a small piece of celluloid, a pornographic film purportedly shot in a bunker in the climactic days of Berlin's fall – with Hitler as its star. One person claims to have access to this unique piece of Naziana; inevitably, more than one want it. Unfortunately for Moll, in the black-market world of erotica, the currency is blackmail, torture and corruption; and no price is too high. As the paranoia builds and the combatants lose sight of their motives, their souls, even the object itself, Don DeLillo reveals the terrible truth behind our acquisitiveness in Running Dog – a masterful thriller from an award-winning novelist. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Mortality and Mercy in Vienna Thomas Pynchon, 1979 |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: A Companion to V. J. Kerry Grant, 2001-01-01 To the uninitiated, Thomas Pynchon’s V. seems to defy comprehension with its open-ended and fragmented narrative, huge cast of characters (some 150 of them), and wide range of often obscure references. J. Kerry Grant’s Companion to “V.” takes us through the novel chapter by chapter, breaking through its daunting surface by summarizing events and clarifying Pynchon’s many allusions. The Companion draws extensively from existing critical and explicative work on V. to suggest the range of interpretations that the novel can support. The hundreds of notes that comprise the Companion are keyed to the three most widely cited editions of V. Most notes are interpretive, but some also provide historical and cultural contexts or help to resurrect other nuances of meaning. Because it does not constitute a particular “reading” of, or “take” on, the novel, the Companion will appeal to a wide range of users. Rather than attempting to make final sense of the novel, the Companion exposes and demystifies Pynchon’s intent to play with our conventional attitudes about fiction. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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 |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon, 2007 The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay pens an homage to the stylish menace of 1940s noir, in a novel that imagines if Alaska, not Israel, had become the homeland for the Jews after World War II. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Stonefish Scott R. Jones, 2020-02-25 A missing tech mogul... ...a jaded reporter... ...a damaged AI returned from a horrifying reality... ...and something lurking in the woods. When journalist Den Secord is tasked with locating enigmatic tech guru Gregor Makarios, he soon finds his understanding of reality under threat. At the edge of the world, surrounded by primeval forests, in the paradisaical environs of Gregor's hi-tech hermitage, Den learns of the true nature of our Universe. This is the way the world ends. Heart of Darkness meets The Magus meets bleeding-edge psychedelic gnosticism in Stonefish, the debut novel from Scott R. Jones (When Stars Are Right, Shout Kill Revel Repeat). |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: A Minor Apocalypse Tadeusz Konwicki, 1983-01 |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Pynchon's Against the Day Jeffrey Severs, Christopher Leise, 2011-02-24 The first book of criticism devoted to Pynschon's massive 2006 novel, Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide gathers new work by more than a dozen scholars, offering readings informed by the newest developments in narratology, genre studies, ecocriticism, globalism, and the histories of science and religion. This title also offers fresh perspectives on divisive issues within Pynchon studies, such as anarchism, gender, and reviewers' reception of his recent work. What emerges is a novel that will come to be seen, these essays argue, as a major part of Pynchon's storied legacy and a key work of the late Pynchon. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Red Pill Hari Kunzru, 2020-09-03 ‘The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next’ Aravind Adiga ‘Astonishing, absorbing, terrifying. Immensely good.’ Philip Pullman '‘Red Pill stands as a final blast of sanity against this new, deranged reality. It is a literary masterpiece for a barbaric new world rapidly running out of room for literary masterpieces.’ The Spectator '[A] deeply intelligent and artfully constructed novel.' Financial Times From the author of White Tears comes a breathtaking, state-of-the-world novel about one man’s struggle to defend his values and create a reality free from the shadows of the past. ‘From now on when you see something, you’re seeing it because I want you to see it. When you think of something, it’ll be because I want you to think about it…’ And with those words, the obsession begins. A writer has left his family in Brooklyn for a three month residency at the Deuter Centre in Berlin, hoping for undisturbed days devoted to artistic absorption. When nothing goes according to plan, he finds himself holed up in his room watching Blue Lives, a violent cop show with a bleak and merciless worldview. One night at a party he meets Anton, the charismatic creator of the show, and strikes up a conversation. It is a conversation that leads him on a journey into the heart of moral darkness. A conversation thatthreatens to destroy everything he holds most dear, including his own mind. Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning. Praise for White Tears ‘Exquisitely attuned’ Washington Post ‘Electrifying, subversive and wildly original’ TheNew Yorker 'A book that everyone should be reading right now' TIME Magazine ‘Haunting, doom-drenched, genuinely and viscerally disturbing...’ The Independent |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Killing Commendatore Haruki Murakami, 2018-10-09 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art—from one of our greatest writers. • “Exhilarating ... magical.” —The Washington Post When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home of a world famous artist. One day, the young painter hears a noise from the attic, and upon investigation, he discovers a previously unseen painting. By unearthing this hidden work of art, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances; and to close it, he must undertake a perilous journey into a netherworld that only Haruki Murakami could conjure. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Murphy Samuel Beckett, Janko Moder, 1982 |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Book of Blues Jack Kerouac, 1995-09-01 Eight extended poems from the acclaimed author of On the Road and Big Sur—featuring an introduction by Robert Creeley Best known for his “Legend of Duluoz” novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In the eight poems collected in Book of Blues, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. “In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to another, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician’s spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses.”—Jack Kerouac These poems include: • San Francisco Blues • Richmond Hill Blues • Bowery Blues • MacDougal Street Blues • Desolation Blues • Orizaba 210 Blues • Orlanda Blues • Cerrada Medellin Blues Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: On Wings of Song Thomas M. Disch, 1985-04-01 In a disturbing vision of the future, Daniel Weinreb leaves behind the repression and censorship of the Midwest to pursue a career in New York, despite the famine and poverty of the overpopulated East Coast |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: Make Yourselves Gods Peter Coviello, 2019-11-14 From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: 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. |
| vineland thomas pynchon summary: The Satirist Dan Geddes, 2012-12-02 Enjoy this hilarious collection of satires, reviews, news, poems, and short stories from The Satirist: America's Most Critical Journal.--P. [4] of cover. |
Home - Vineland, NJ
The City of Vineland has met the rigorous requirements to achieve Sustainable Jersey Certification. Sustainable Jersey is a state-wide initiative focused on helping municipalities …
Welcome - Vineland, NJ
2019 – The Delsea Drive-in theater is named one of the nation’s top 14 Nostalgic Places and Getaways to visit by www.expedia-aarp.com which are like “time capsules from the past.”; …
Things to Do - Vineland, NJ
Recreation. Vineland features 18 parks and recreational areas which include picnic facilities, dozens of lighted fields and courts, hiking trails, walking paths, disc golf courses, and much …
About - Vineland, NJ
Thank you for visiting the City of Vineland’s official website! Whether you are a current resident; interested in moving to Vineland; or starting, relocating, or growing a business here, this site …
Recreation - Vineland, NJ
The Recreation Division works to enhance and cultivate recreational activities within the City of Vineland. The Division is committed to providing the highest quality recreational facilities for …
Zoning - Vineland, NJ
When considering changes to your property in the City of Vineland, you will most likely require both zoning and construction permits. The following is a general outline regarding when a …
Recycling And Solid Waste Management - Vineland, NJ
The City of Vineland utilizes a single stream recycling program which allows residents to combine all of their household generated recyclable material, including glass, metal, plastic, cardboard, …
Departments Contact Directory - Vineland, NJ
Vineland City Hall 640 East Wood St Vineland, NJ 08360 (856) 794-4000
In The News - Vineland, NJ
Nov 4, 2024 · Vineland City Hall 640 East Wood St Vineland, NJ 08360 (856) 794-4000
Licenses And Inspections - Vineland, NJ
Contractors, businesses, property owners, landlords, and tenants in the City of Vineland are all served by the Department. L&I includes the following Divisions, Code Enforcement, Licensing, …
Home - Vineland, NJ
The City of Vineland has met the rigorous requirements to achieve Sustainable Jersey Certification. Sustainable Jersey is a state-wide initiative focused on helping municipalities …
Welcome - Vineland, NJ
2019 – The Delsea Drive-in theater is named one of the nation’s top 14 Nostalgic Places and Getaways to visit by www.expedia-aarp.com which are like “time capsules from the past.”; …
Things to Do - Vineland, NJ
Recreation. Vineland features 18 parks and recreational areas which include picnic facilities, dozens of lighted fields and courts, hiking trails, walking paths, disc golf courses, and much …
About - Vineland, NJ
Thank you for visiting the City of Vineland’s official website! Whether you are a current resident; interested in moving to Vineland; or starting, relocating, or growing a business here, this site …
Recreation - Vineland, NJ
The Recreation Division works to enhance and cultivate recreational activities within the City of Vineland. The Division is committed to providing the highest quality recreational facilities for …
Zoning - Vineland, NJ
When considering changes to your property in the City of Vineland, you will most likely require both zoning and construction permits. The following is a general outline regarding when a …
Recycling And Solid Waste Management - Vineland, NJ
The City of Vineland utilizes a single stream recycling program which allows residents to combine all of their household generated recyclable material, including glass, metal, plastic, cardboard, …
Departments Contact Directory - Vineland, NJ
Vineland City Hall 640 East Wood St Vineland, NJ 08360 (856) 794-4000
In The News - Vineland, NJ
Nov 4, 2024 · Vineland City Hall 640 East Wood St Vineland, NJ 08360 (856) 794-4000
Licenses And Inspections - Vineland, NJ
Contractors, businesses, property owners, landlords, and tenants in the City of Vineland are all served by the Department. L&I includes the following Divisions, Code Enforcement, Licensing, …
