New Close Readings of The Crying of Lot 49

This book provides numerous new interpretations of Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, arguably the most epistemologically complex novel, page for page, ever written. One of the continuing surprises of the 1960s was that such a novel was destined to become a blockbuster. The continual flow of new editions demonstrates that THE CRYING OF LOT 49 has remained a major seller well into the first decade of the 21st century. It is not surprising that J. Kerry Grant reported that some "Forty years after its first publication, [THE CRYING OF LOT 49] is still selling at the rate of between fifteen and twenty thousand copies annually." Kohn's close readings of Pynchon's novel draw on writings by Henry Adams, Roland Barthes, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Loren Eiseley, W.Y. Evans-Wentz, E.M. Forster, Don DeLillo, F.R. Leavis, Paul Virilio and Jerry Wilkerson.