Download or read book Mason Dixon written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
Download or read book Mason Dixon Fourth Grade Disasters written by Claudia Mills and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here's the second entry in veteran author Claudia Mills' charming middle-grade series, which finds the lovably sardonic title character starting the fourth grade, which he's dreading: everyone in fourth grade is expected to join the school choir. And sing. In front of everyone. Mason can't think of many things he enjoys less than singing. But performing in front of other people might come close; Mason devises a foolproof plan that will keep him out of the spotlight on concert night. Of course, in the world of Mason Dixon, there is no such thing as a foolproof plan. There is only disaster.
Download or read book Walkin the Line written by William Ecenbarger and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Mason-Dixon Line could talk, here are the stories. It would tell. Pulitzerprize winning reporter and travel writer Bill Ecenbarger has walked the Mason-Dixon line - from its beginning on Fenwick Island, Delaware, to its end at Brown's Hill, Pennsylvania - diverting left and right to Interview the people who live along its border. The line was surveyed between 1763 and 1768 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to settle a dispute between Robert Penn and Lord Calvert, whose family owned what is now the state of Maryland. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law to abolish slavery, making the Mason-Dixon Line the divider between free and slave states. From that moment, it also became a lightning rod for racial conflict that continues to this day. This unique history/travelogue examines the influence of this great divider, which remains the most powerful symbol separating Yankee from Rebel, oatmeal from grits, North from South.
Download or read book Pet Disasters written by Claudia Mills and published by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine-year-old Mason's parents keep trying to get him a pet, but until he and his best friend Brody adopt a three-legged dog, he is not interested.
Download or read book Boundaries written by Sally M. Walker and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Secrets of a Civil War Submarine traces the history of the Mason-Dixon Line as reflected by family feuds, exploration, scientific advancement and the cultural conflicts between America's northern and southern states.
Download or read book The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon s Mason Dixon written by Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays examining the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of postmodernism; Mason & Dixon went further, using the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an 18th century when "America" was being formed as both place and idea. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, as he levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. This volume of new essays studies the interface between 18th- and 20th-century cultureboth in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, as the contributors take up the linkages between the 18th and 20th centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as withthe literary text itself. Contributors: Mitchum Huehls, Brian Thill, Colin Clarke, Pedro Garcia-Caro, Dennis Lensing, Justin M. Scott Coe, Ian Copestake, Frank Palmeri. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is Professor and Chair of the English Department at SUNY Brockport.
Download or read book The Familiar Volume 1 written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only to end up trying to save a creature as fragile as it is dangerous . . . which will change not only her life and the lives of those she has yet to encounter, but this world, too—or at least the world we think we know and the future we take for granted. (With full-color illustrations throughout.) Like the print edition, this eBook contains a complex image-based layout. It is most readable on e-reading devices with larger screen sizes.
Download or read book The Scary Mason Dixon Line written by Trudier Harris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.
Download or read book The History of Mason and Dixon s Line written by John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the demarcation of the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania that became the dividing line between free and slave states. Latrobe was a lawyer, inventor, and speaker; he was also president of the American Colonization Society (1853-90), founder of the Maryland Historical Society, and a central figure in the movement to colonize the Republic of Liberia.
Download or read book Exploring the Mason Dixon Line written by John Layton and published by American History Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Charles I of England granted the Calvert Family a charter for the Colony of Maryland in 1632. Forty-nine years later, in 1681, Charles II awarded the Penn Family a similar charter for Pennsylvania. However, the ambiguity of the language and lack of precision in both grants sowed the seeds of dispute over a sixty-nine mile parcel of land between the 39th and 40th degrees of North Latitude. Had the Calverts prevailed, part of the City of Philadelphia would now be in Maryland, and had the Penns succeeded Baltimore would today be in the state of Pennsylvania! Arguments between the opposing parties dragged on for more than half a century before the English Courts finally issued a decree: Neither the Calverts nor the Penns would prevail; the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania would be a line of latitude located fifteen miles due south of the most southern point in the city of Philadelphia. As a result, in 1763 two British mathematicians and surveyors-Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon-were commissioned to accurately survey and mark the 244- mile boundary between the two colonies.We all have referred to the resulting Mason Dixon Line in casual conversation as the line that divides Pennsylvania and Maryland, or perhaps as the line between the free and slave states during the Civil War. But what do we actually know about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and why is an imaginary line named after them? Author Jack Layton decided to find out. Over the course of several years he literally walked the line, recording his observations and taking revealing photographs along the entire route. The results-informative, entertaining, ironic and amusing-form the heart of this book. Luckily for us, Charles Mason was a meticulous man who kept a detailed journal of his remarkable experiences in the New World. Mr. Layton used his daily record, kept during the three years that he and his partner spent traipsing through the mountains and valleys of America, as the backbone for this book, with liberal use of direct quotations. Amazingly, some of what the men saw and described has not changed much in the intervening two-and-a-half centuries, while other sights would not be recognizable at all today. Enjoy a trip back to colonial America. Join Jack Layton as he takes a walk in the footsteps of history, following the path blazed by two men whose names and the boundary they surveyed are today a household word-the Mason Dixon Line!
Download or read book Stealing Freedom Along the Mason Dixon Line written by Milt Diggins and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, freedom, and kidnapping in the mid-Atlantic. This is the story of Thomas McCreary, a slave catcher from Cecil County, Maryland. Reviled by some, proclaimed a hero by others, he first drew public attention in the late 1840s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War. McCreary and his community provide a framework to examine slave catching and kidnapping in the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia region and how those activities contributed to the nation’s political and visceral divide.
Download or read book A Gravity s Rainbow Companion written by Steven C. Weisenburger and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."
Download or read book Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason Dixon Line written by Clifford R. Murphy and published by Dust to Digital. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ola Belle Reed (1916-2002) was one of the all-time greatest performers of Appalachian music. Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line combines Reed's 1960s recordings, some of the earliest she ever made and available here for the very first time, with modern-day field recordings of her descendants and those she inspired within her Appalachian community. This deluxe edition highlights Reed's deep repertoire--folk ballads, minstrel songs, country standards and originals--and traces the impact her music made and is still making today. The two-CD set is accompanied by a luxurious publication tracing Reed's influence and the folklorists who have tracked it: Henry Glassie, who first heard Alex and Ola Belle play in 1966 at the back of the Campbell's Corner general store, and Clifford R. Murphy, who, four decades later, recorded Reed's modern successors in Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Mason Dixon Pynchon written by Charles Clerc and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Thomas Pynchon's fifth novel, Mason and Dixon, published in the spring of 1997. Reviews Pynchon's career and works, then examines critical reception of Mason and Dixon, his combination of fact and fiction in the novel, and critical perspectives from which to view the novel. Includes excerpts from The Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, 1763-1768. Clerc is a writer and critic. He has written previously on the work of Thomas Pynchon. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Boys South of the Mason Dixon written by Abbi Glines and published by . This book was released on 2017-05-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only thing hotter than the weather South of the Mason Dixon line are the boys. Worn, faded blue jeans, slow Southern drawls, and those naughty moments in the back of pickup trucks a girl never forgets. Welcome to the world of the Sutton boys. Five brothers who fight, party, drink a little too much, but more importantly, they love their momma. Nothing can tear them apart... until the girl next door wins more than one of their hearts.
Download or read book Pynchon and Mason Dixon written by Brooke Horvath and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the contemporary American novelist's most recent work
Download or read book Slow Learner written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers." - New Republic "Funny and wise enough to charm the gravity from a rainbow...All five of the pieces have unusual narrative vigor and inventiveness." - New York Times Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, Slow Learner showcases Thomas Pynchon’s writing before the publication of his first novel V. The stories compiled here are “The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration,” along with an introduction by Pynchon himself that Time magazine calls his "first public gesture toward autobiography."
