An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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Thomas Pynchon
24 posts
The Last Book I Loved: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick and the Shifting of Cultural Values
Whose stories deserve to be told? Who deserves to tell them? And how?
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
Pynchon’s Dirty Secret
But I don’t want to talk about dick jokes, here. I want to talk about Pynchon’s love stories. Sean Carswell, sometimes Pynchon scholar, writes about the part of Pynchon no…
On Writing For Old White Men
At the LA Times, Claire Vaye Watkins recounts her realization that she has been writing to appeal to the white male literary establishment: I am trying to write something urgent,…
Pynchon in Colonial New England
At the Public Domain Review, read about Thomas Pynchon’s oldest colonial ancestor, who also happened to be a writer—though he was much less successful and much more heavily censored.
The Rumpus Interview with Garth Risk Hallberg
Garth Risk Hallberg talks about his debut, City on Fire, living in New York City now and in the ’70s, and the anxiety and gratitude you feel when your first novel generates so much buzz.
The Hermits
For Lit Hub, Jonathan Russell Clark examines our fascination with reclusive writers.
Teaching Pynchon
At its worst, Pynchon’s prose is a beautiful failure. At its best, Pynchon’s prose is revelatory. Nick Ripatrazone, writing for The Millions, talks about what makes it so hard to…
Lighten Up
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a light neo-noir comedy, just like the Pynchon novel that inspired it. Despite our eagerness to overanalyze film adaptations of complicated books, Katie Kilkenny…
Anderson Doesn’t “Cut and Paste”
In an interview for NPR, director Paul Thomas Anderson shares his experience adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the big screen: I approached it in the most straightforward but laborious way I could…
The Private Eye Period Piece
For a while now, such characters, if not totally extinct, have been on a steady life-support drip of nostalgia. In an age when GPS tracking, oversharing and 8 Signs Your…