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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 one really talks about: cheesy love stories. Specifically referencing Roger and Jessica from Pynchon’s most well-known book, Gravity’s Rainbow, Carswell talks about the mirror provided for […]
...moreAt 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, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying to identify and articulate my innermost feelings, trying to make you feel them too, trying […]
...moreAt 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.
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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.
...moreFor Lit Hub, Jonathan Russell Clark examines our fascination with reclusive writers.
...moreAt 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 teach The Crying of Lot 49.
...morePaul 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 warns us not to take this one too seriously: Inherent Vice inherently rewards only half-serious analysis… Semiotics nerds, who so love Pynchon, might call the […]
...moreIn 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 come up with. I transcribed the dialogue… And there were multiple times when I thought, “Why don’t I just call the publisher and get a […]
...moreFor 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 Man Is Cheating listicles make their services unnecessary, the old-school gumshoe feels as irrelevant as Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple felt a generation before. All […]
...moreThomas Pynchon is a reclusive author—or so we are told. Vice unearths the origins of Pynchon’s famous isolation, attributing the legend to the Paris Review‘s George Plimpton: It all started 51 years ago, in 1963, when George Plimpton in the New York Times published the line: “Pynchon is in his early twenties; he writes in […]
...moreWith Inherent Vice the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival, Logan Hill sits down with the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, for the New York Times. He seems particularly eager to learn whether or not Pynchon, the notoriously reclusive author, makes a cameo.
...moreIn 1966, when The Crying of Lot 49 was published, Pynchon’s “all-ecompassing paranoiac vision of history” seemed “so kooky” and “far-fetched.” Fast forward to 2013, and Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, a novel focused on events before, during, and after 9/11 “becomes not just an ideal but a compulsory subject for a late Pynchon novel,” as Michael […]
...moreThough it can be hard to remember between tweeting at your favorite writer and joining a Facebook event page for a reading, there was a time when many authors led reclusive lives with minimal self-promotion. Bookish has rounded up a list of some of the most private (Salinger, Pynchon)—and their modern-day, super-public opposites (John Green, […]
...moreHow did Los Angeles, that haven of low-culture and strip mall malaise beat us (San Francisco) to the punch with high-brow coffee? (I jest. L.A. is great if you want to buy human bone jewelry, guzzle incredible garlic sauce, and hang out with famous porn stars in a 24 hour Jewish deli.) How did not […]
...moreIt isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.
...moreOver at New York Magazine, Sam Anderson (interviewed here) has published a review of Inherent Vice that is one of the funniest pans of a novel I’ve ever read. “There is no easy way to say this,” Anderson begins, “so here it is. I hate Thomas Pynchon.”
...more“In 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the highest honor available in the field once known as “science fiction” — a term now mostly forgotten. “Sorry, just dreaming… [T]hough Gravity’s Rainbow really was nominated for the 1973 Nebula, it was passed over for Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, which commentator Carter […]
...moreInherent Vice is “a noir-like novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s” that follows “a dope-smoking private detective named Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello.” It is 384 pages long and hits book stores tomorrow. An agency in LA is already handling the story’s film rights. Oh yea, it also happens to be the […]
...moreThis week, the book blogs are obsessed. They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both authors and look forward to reading both books, but this week, the blogs talked so incessantly about them that I will make this roundup a […]
...moreGreetings and salutations! I’m Michael Berger, today’s guest-editor. I’ve spent my last few days off sipping coffee and drifting through the labyrinth of book blogs. Which was terrific, because most of my work week was spent moving a bookstore. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the 25 year old San Francisco used bookstore Phoenix Books is not […]
...moreA review of Sag Harbor, followed by an interview with Colson Whitehead—or, as we like to call this literary twofer: The Rumpus Original Combo.
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