http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/ 27/7/13 12.

05 pm Thomas Pynchon is a reclusive American novelist possessed by a certain eclectic genius, an architect of literary structures that range from immense tesseracts to tiny, perfect gems. Charting a dizzying course through the worlds hidden in the curve between the blue depths of Absolute Zero and the ineffable awareness of the Universe Entire, his works explore the vast space between Burroughs shlupp! and Joyces yes.Author of only five novels and a few short stories, his creations have been hailed as some of the most original works to have been transmuted from the decay of the twentieth century. Pynchons style of writing is unique, electrifying, and complex. A potential map to self-awareness as well as an intricate puzzle-box, this postmodern Deadalus has paradoxically constructed his verbal mazes not to confound, but to reveal. Simply put, his iconoclastic prose is both gnostic in intention and delightful in execution. Like the labyrinthine chains of DNA coiled in the nucleus of life, it is often dense and convoluted in structure, but the encoded message is shimmering, elusive, and profound. And, like life itself, it presents equal measures of beauty and obscenity, awareness and obfuscation, comedy and tragedy. http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/235.Thomas_Pynchon 27/7/13 12.18 pm
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American writer based in New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963),The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), andAgainst the Day (2006). Pynchon is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest contemporary authors. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumours about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (/pn tn/[1] May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. AMacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and complex novels. Both his fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[2]and he is regularly cited by Americans as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[3] Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Poet L. E. Sissman, wrote from The New Yorker: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy."(Sissman 1973)

Sissman, L. E.. "Hieronymus and Robert Bosch: The Art of Thomas Pynchon." The New Yorker 49, 19 May 1973, pp. 13840. More commonly classified as a postmodernist author,[12][13][14] Pynchon's work has also been described as "high modern".[15] V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." It was nominated for a National Book Award. The Crying of Lot 49 is a novella by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example ofpostmodern fiction. Time included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". [1] Slow Learner is the 1984 published collection of six early novellas by the Americannovelist Thomas Pynchon, originally published in various sources between 1959 and 1964. The book is also notable for its introduction, written by Pynchon. His comments on the stories after reading them again for the first time in many years, and his recollection of the events surrounding their creation, amount to the author's only autobiographical comments to his readers. Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's reelection. Through flashbacks by its characters, who have lived the sixties in their youth, the story accounts for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describes the traits of the fascistic Nixonian repression and its War on drugs that clashed with it; and it articulates the slide and transformation that occurred in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by U.S. author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It concentrates on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of theRevolutionary War in the United States. The novel is a frame narrative told from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason's and Dixon's biographies with history, fantasy, legend, speculation, and outright fabrication. Against the Day is a 2006 historical novel by Thomas Pynchon. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War Iand features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe,Mexico, Central Asia, and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance, and at 1,085 pages it is the longest of Pynchon's novels.
[1]

Inherent Vice takes place in the same world as Vineland, a California peopled by hippies and the cops who prey on them, plus assorted musicians, lunatics, militants, and crooks. But where Vineland is set in 1984, the dark heart of the Reagan years, Inherent Vicehappens in 1970, when the counterculture is still in full swing, even if signs of its decay have begun to appear.

Bleeding Edge[edit]
On January 4, 2013, Washington Post editor Ron Charles announced via Twitter that Pynchon was set to publish a new novel, titledThe Bleeding Edge, according to his publisher Penguin Press.[10]

On February 25, 2013, Penguin stated the new novel, Bleeding Edge, would take place in Manhattan's Silicon Alley during the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11." The release date for the novel is September 17, 2013.[11] Along with its emphasis on sociopolitical themes such as racism and imperialism, its awareness and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, andfolk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing.