Winner of the coveted William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1963, V. remains a popular literary classic by one of America's great modernists.

V. Paperback Thomas Pynchon

Literature & Fiction

Thomas Pynchon

Contemporary

Harpercollins

Mason & Dixon Dumpbin X24

Vintage

Gravitys Rainbow

Literary

Random House Publishing Group

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the revolution, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. Meanwhile, Thomas Pynchon is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-fact occurrences occur. Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what the world might be.

Against the Day

Vintage Books USA

"Slow Learner" is a compilation of early stories written between 1959 and 1964, before Pynchon achieved recognition as a prominent writer for his 1963 novel, "V" and containing a revelatory essay on his early influences and writing. The collection consists of five short stories: "The Small Rain", "Lowlands", "Entropy", "Under the Rose", and "The Secret Integration", as well as an introduction written by Pynchon himself for the 1984 publication. The five stories were originally published individually in various literary magazines but in 1984, after Pynchon had achieved greater recognition, "Slow Learner" was published to collect and copyright the stories into one volume. The introduction also offers a rare insight into Pynchon's own views on his work and influences.

Slow Learner: Early Stories

Genre Fiction

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, "The Crying of Lot 49" opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting "The Crying of Lot 49". This is one of Pynchon's shortest novels and one of his best.

The Crying of Lot 49

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, "Gravity's Rainbow", refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. "Gravity's Rainbow", however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. "Gravity's Rainbow" is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

Gravity's Rainbow

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 re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Mason and Dixon

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she haas been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49. One of Pynchon's shortest novels and one of his best.

Penguin Books, Ltd.

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George, Orwell

Penguin books, limited

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Books by Thomas Pynchon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thomas Pynchon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

V. Paperback Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon Dumpbin X24

Gravitys Rainbow

Against the Day

Slow Learner: Early Stories

The Crying of Lot 49

Gravity's Rainbow

Mason and Dixon

The Crying of Lot 49

Nineteen Eighty-Four