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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

The exhausting plenitude of loosely connected detail in Gravity’s Rainbow makes it a favorite of postmodern critics, who claim it describes a modern, random, unknowable universe. Hume expands the possibilities as she discloses a mythic structure that underlies Pynchon’s work and provides easier access to his world.  Myth turns chaos into cosmos,” Hume explains, describing how the profuse detail of Pynchon’s book allows for the creation of a world humankind shapes out of chaos by means of ritual and myth. . . a set of interlocking stories. . . [that] fit into a narrative sequence or mythology that conveys, supports, and challenges cultural values.” Pynchon’s mythology is not rigidly consistent,” Hume notes, but several strands of mythological action. . . serve a stabilizing function in this chaotic book.” Pynchon creates his own unheroic” hero to show the way for making sense of the fragmented experience of life in the postmodern world.

Istime an illusion? Do past, present, and future co-exist in a timelesswhole, or are our experiences of change and duration the reality of time?Thomas Pynchon's writing has always been interested in the interplay of thesetwo ways of thinking about time, but his recent fiction has also taken onthe task of imaginatively responding to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, whichin the early years of the twentieth century renewed this ancient debate. Inthis book, Simon deBourcier looks in detail at Pynchon's 2006 novel Againstthe Day, which is set during the period in which Einstein published hisworld-changing theory, and 1997's Mason & Dixon, set in theeighteenth century when Isaac Newton's picture of a world governed by absolutespace and time was unchallenged. By comparing these two novels, Pynchon andRelativity shows that Pynchon's tales of loss, haunting, and time travelare informed by a sophisticated awareness of the philosophical implications ofRelativity. The book goes on to examine the consequences of this for ourreading of Pynchon's other work.

The exhausting plenitude of loosely connected detail in Gravity’s Rainbow makes it a favorite of postmodern critics, who claim it describes a modern, random, unknowable universe. Hume expands the possibilities as she discloses a mythic structure that underlies Pynchon’s work and provides easier access to his world.  Myth turns chaos into cosmos,” Hume explains, describing how the profuse detail of Pynchon’s book allows for the creation of a world humankind shapes out of chaos by means of ritual and myth. . . a set of interlocking stories. . . [that] fit into a narrative sequence or mythology that conveys, supports, and challenges cultural values.” Pynchon’s mythology is not rigidly consistent,” Hume notes, but several strands of mythological action. . . serve a stabilizing function in this chaotic book.” Pynchon creates his own unheroic” hero to show the way for making sense of the fragmented experience of life in the postmodern world.

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.62

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

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.

Thomas Pynchon has received an unparalleled amount of criticism in the twenty-five years since the publication of his first novel: two dozen books, dozens of chapters in other books, hundreds of articles, even his own journal. No other novelist has generated as much criticism in as short a time, making Clifford Mead’s bibliography a welcome and indispensable guide.Section one catalogues Pynchon’s own writings―books, magazine contributions, reprints, translations, and piracies―while section two offers an exhaustive listing of virtually everything that had been written on Pynchon by 1989. Two special sections enhance the value of this book: one reprints Pynchon’s dozen or so endorsements written for other books―most inaccessible or out-of-print―while the other reprints Pynchon’s hitherto unknown contributions to his high school newspaper.The book is illustrated throughout with photographs of dust jacket covers (including a trial cover for Gravity’s Rainbow), rare ephemera, and pictures of the young Pynchon from his high school yearbook.

The appearance of Vineland, his first novel in seventeen years, has rekindled critical debate on Thomas Pynchon. Written before the publication of the new novel, but remarkably prescient about its themes, The Gnostic Pynchon is a provocative reading of Pynchon's work. Where most critics find in Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer of indeterministic, relativistic, contingent fiction, Dwight Eddins also finds a man on a religious quest. Pynchon's quest, Eddins shows, is for some principle of organic order that will provide an alternative to hopeless ambiguity, or an equally hopeless choice between total chaos and total control. The Gnostic Pynchon is a profoundly revisionist view of one of this century's most important writers.

A collection of critical essays on Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" arranged in chronological order of publication.

Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of postmodernism; Mason & Dixon went further, using the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an 18th century when "America" was being formed as both place and idea. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, as he levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. This volume of new essays studies the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, as the contributors take up the linkages between the 18th and 20th centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as with the literary text itself. Contributors: Mitchum Huehls, Brian Thill, Colin Clarke, Pedro Garcia-Caro, Dennis Lensing, Justin M. Scott Coe, Ian Copestake, Frank Palmeri. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is Professor and Chair of the English Department at SUNY Brockport.

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Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

The appearance of Vineland, his first novel in seventeen years, has rekindled critical debate on Thomas Pynchon. Written before the publication of the new novel, but remarkably prescient about its themes, The Gnostic Pynchon is a provocative reading of Pynchon's work. Where most critics find in Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer of indeterministic, relativistic, contingent fiction, Dwight Eddins also finds a man on a religious quest. Pynchon's quest, Eddins shows, is for some principle of organic order that will provide an alternative to hopeless ambiguity, or an equally hopeless choice between total chaos and total control. The Gnostic Pynchon is a profoundly revisionist view of one of this century's most important writers.

Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

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.

A collection of critical essays on Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" arranged in chronological order of publication.

Thomas Pynchon has received an unparalleled amount of criticism in the twenty-five years since the publication of his first novel: two dozen books, dozens of chapters in other books, hundreds of articles, even his own journal. No other novelist has generated as much criticism in as short a time, making Clifford Mead’s bibliography a welcome and indispensable guide.Section one catalogues Pynchon’s own writings―books, magazine contributions, reprints, translations, and piracies―while section two offers an exhaustive listing of virtually everything that had been written on Pynchon by 1989. Two special sections enhance the value of this book: one reprints Pynchon’s dozen or so endorsements written for other books―most inaccessible or out-of-print―while the other reprints Pynchon’s hitherto unknown contributions to his high school newspaper.The book is illustrated throughout with photographs of dust jacket covers (including a trial cover for Gravity’s Rainbow), rare ephemera, and pictures of the young Pynchon from his high school yearbook.