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Mason & Dixon: A Novel
Thomas Pynchon
Picador, 2004
Twice-read Jeremiad
I was disappointed by Pynchon's latest, 'Against the Day', but decided it stronger to reinforce my support for this mature masterpiece than add to the noise around the later juvenile epic.
Pynchon's usual weakness is to treat his secondary characters to more ...
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Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Classics, 2006
The Mother of All War Novels
If you have not experienced Pynchon before, getting ready to have your life taken over for a while. I bought this book when I was a freshman in college at the suggestion of my Political Science professor and, after several unsuccessful initial attempts, it remained ...
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The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library)
Thomas Pynchon
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006
A Beautiful Sad and Funny Book
One day Mrs. Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executor of her ex-lover's will. As she proceeds she discovers that the legacy with which she has been entrusted draws her ever deeper into a complex web of conspiracies. Yet what she has discovered may be no ...
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Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin (Non-Classics), 2000
Fear and Loathing in Peenemunde
This is the mother of all post-modern novels. Much has been said about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; even more written about it since it was published 35 years ago.
There are a myriad of threads running through this novel. I have read Gravity's Rainbow four times ...
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V. (Perennial Classics)
Thomas Pynchon
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999
Thank God for the last chapter
I like this book. After I read the last chapter I loved the thing. It's not the most compelling read as you're going through, and half of the time I was asking myself "why keep reading?"...
Then I finished the book (more importantly the last chapter) and it was as ...
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Plume, 2003
So Possible it's scary
1984 is a great novel, even for the casual reader. What I think is terrifying is that it is possible in our time. Big brother could be watching (wiretaps with no court order) and if you don't share his view you might end up in room 101 (Guantanamo) as an "enemy ...
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Vineland (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Classics, 1997
More accesable; thoroughly enjoyable!
My first introduction to Pynchon was "The Crying of Lot 49." I liked it, and then I tried to crack open "Gravity's Rainbow." Tried as I might, I couldn't make head or tail of it, but that was some time ago.
I first read "Vineland" after a second failed attempt ...
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Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007
What I learned from Thomas Pynchon
Five Things that I learned from Thomas Pynchon.
1) There is no holy grail or philosopher's stone or ur-text of any kind; in the place of these illusory dreams of wholeness what we have is the secular epiphany or the illumination. Scientists, corporate executives, ...
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Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Twentieth-Century Classics)
Richard Farina
Penguin Classics, 1996
A specter of Cornell's past ?!
Farina captures with his semi-autobiographic book the spirit of the 60s as well as the spirit of Cornell and its campus life as it used to be and maybe sometimes still is.
Sometimes crude and to some maybe offensive, often surprising, but never boring, Farina tells ...
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Slow Learner: Ea Stories Tag: With an introduction by the author
Thomas Pynchon
Back Bay Books, 1985
A Pynch of early Pynchon
I agree with other reviewers that the fun of this book lies in Pynchon's thoughts of these early efforts. It made the reading of them much more enjoyable. It also made them seem better then they really were, since I realized they were not to be judged in the same light ...
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The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
Counterpoint, 2008
A Batman episode slowed to soap-opera speed; a game of baseball played by T. S. Eliot and Willem de Kooning; an illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These imaginative riffs on reality could only have been generated by the brilliant bad boy of American letters, Donald Barthelme. Here, 63 rare short works by Barthelme ? satires and ...
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Stone Junction
Jim Dodge
Grove Press, 1998
Crazy Sanity
Stone Junction reads like a literary Frankenstein construct - equal parts Tom Robbins' whimsy, Umberto Eco's esotericism, and Ken Kesey's individualism/anarchism, yet it is all Jim Dodge's brilliance. If this witches brew makes you blanche in horror then avoid this ...
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MASON AND DIXON
THOMAS PYNCHON
JONATHAN CAPE, 1997
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Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Bantam, 1973
A promising plot and some entertaining digressions undone by a sense of trying too hard
Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is often looked upon as the author's magnum opus, a 900-page monster that, in constructing its fairly straightforward story, plunders all the riches of history and many of the sciences that its author found fascinating.
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Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin (Non-Classics), 1987
Don't overanalyze. Don't underestimate.
There are those that consider "Gravity's Rainbow" the greatest American novel of this, or perhaps any, century. I can't make a case for or against this; I haven't read 'em all. However, I will say that "Gravity's Rainbow" is good enough to at least deserve some of ...
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