Thomas Pynchon Titles to Read after One Battle After Another Wins Best Picture

The new novel from Thomas Pynchon

A New York Times Notable Book"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 ReviewIt 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?

The New York Times bestseller • Named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times“The funniest book Pynchon has written.” —Rolling Stones“Entertainment of a high order.” —Time MagazinePart 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.It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere 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 one of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

A New York Times Bestseller • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book“[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review“Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar . . . Buy Against the Day." —The Philadelphia InquirerSpanning 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.

The inspiration for One Battle After Another "Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservatice, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human . . . [Pynchon's] voice - absolutely unmistakeable and absolutely inimitable . . . is the American voice of the late twentieth century." —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 him 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 pop 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."