Download or read book The Crying of Lot 49 written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times “The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.
Download or read book A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 written by J. Kerry Grant and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains more than 500 notes keyed to the "2006 Harper Perennial Modern Classics", the "1986 Harper Perennial Library", and the 1967 Bantam editions. This edition adds quotations and paraphrases drawn from criticism published since 1994. It includes more than fifty annotations that have been added and eighty annotations that have been expanded.
Download or read book Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The funniest book Pynchon has written." — Rolling Stone "Entertainment of a high order." - Time Part 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. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly 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 of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.
Download or read book New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 written by Patrick O'Donnell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Crying of Lot 49 is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the '50s and '60s in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays on Thomas Pynchon's important novel, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine the novel's "semiotic regime" or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American writer, Jorge Luis Borges; metaphor in the novel; the novel's narrative strategies; and the novel within the cultural contexts of American Puritanism and the Beat movement. Together, these essays provide an examination of the novel within its literary, historical, and scientific contexts.
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."
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Pynchon s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works written by Thomas Schaub and published by Approaches to Teaching World L. This book was released on 2008 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As teachers well know, the elements that make Thomas Pynchon exciting to read and study—the historical references, the multilayered prose, and the postmodern integration of high and low cultures and science and literature—often constitute hurdles to undergraduate and graduate readers alike. The essays gathered in this volume turn these classroom challenges into assets, showing instructors how to make the narratives' frustration of reader expectations not only intellectually rewarding but also part of the joy of reading The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and other Pynchon works, short and long. Like all volumes in the Approaches to Teaching series, the collection opens with a survey of original and supplementary materials. The essays that follow offer an array of classroom techniques: among them, ways to contextualize the novels in their historical settings, from Puritan America through World War II and the volatile 1960s; to use the texts to explore racial and gender politics and legacies of colonialism; and to make Pynchon's elaborate prose style accessible to students. Teachers will also find sample syllabi for courses solely on Pynchon as well as suggestions for incorporating his work into graduate and undergraduate classrooms at a range of institutions.
Download or read book Vineland written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human." - 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 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 popular 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.”
Download or read book Pynchon s California written by Scott McClintock and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009). Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian
Download or read book The Satirist written by Dan Geddes and published by . This book was released on 2012-12-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Enjoy this hilarious collection of satires, reviews, news, poems, and short stories from The Satirist: America's Most Critical Journal."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Gravity s Rainbow written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 885 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1974 National Book Award "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." - The New Republic “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel written by Marina MacKay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, from Don Quixote to Midnight's Children. A glossary of key terms and a guide to further reading are included, making this an ideal accompaniment to introductory courses on the novel.
Download or read book Against the Day written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 1541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant.” —USA Today “Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling.” —The Boston Globe Spanning 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.
Download or read book Chimera written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called "stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths’ relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, "There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.”
Download or read book Simulacrum within Pynchon s The Crying of Lot 49 written by Dominika Oliver and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-04-08 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature Review from the year 2012 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: A-, University of Pittsburgh, language: English, abstract: The paper is a basic literature paper on the theme of Simulacrum withing the book The Crying of Lot 49. Simulacrum is the inferior reproduction of another object, such as Muzaq trying to represent classical music. Throughout this book, the main character finds herself in many situations where simulacrum occurs, such as the Beatle's rip-off band within the book.
Download or read book A Companion to V written by J. Kerry Grant and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the uninitiated, Thomas Pynchon’s V. seems to defy comprehension with its open-ended and fragmented narrative, huge cast of characters (some 150 of them), and wide range of often obscure references. J. Kerry Grant’s Companion to “V.” takes us through the novel chapter by chapter, breaking through its daunting surface by summarizing events and clarifying Pynchon’s many allusions. The Companion draws extensively from existing critical and explicative work on V. to suggest the range of interpretations that the novel can support. The hundreds of notes that comprise the Companion are keyed to the three most widely cited editions of V. Most notes are interpretive, but some also provide historical and cultural contexts or help to resurrect other nuances of meaning. Because it does not constitute a particular “reading” of, or “take” on, the novel, the Companion will appeal to a wide range of users. Rather than attempting to make final sense of the novel, the Companion exposes and demystifies Pynchon’s intent to play with our conventional attitudes about fiction.
Download or read book Lionel Lancet and the Right Vibe written by Daniel Backer and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Art Lancet dies, his lazy grandson Lionel is named the heir to his estate. Lionel, who spends his days smoking weed and watching atheists on YouTube, expects wealth from his inheritance and a guarantee that his life will be work-free. Instead, he inherits a foundation mired in legal trouble and a job at the Hotel Bellehaven, a seaside resort managed by a failed film producer who verbally abuses him in front of guests. With lawsuits looming, Lionel reluctantly faces the almost insurmountable obstacle of working for a living. To make matters worse, a famous actress takes an interest in him and tests his atheism with her spiritual bent. Lionel worries that he'll be stuck with a beautiful celebrity at a luxurious hotel forever until he begins to suspect that there might be a conspiracy to kill him in a ritual sacrifice. Blending noir and psychedelia, Lionel Lancet and the Right Vibe is a satire of self-aggrandizing spirituality, cultural appropriation, and dark money in right-wing politics.
Download or read book Tinderbox written by Megan Dunn and published by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited. This book was released on 2024-08-13 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Megan Dunn had lost the plot—in her life and in her art. Her attempt to write a fictional tribute to Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t going well. Her employer, the bookseller Borders, was going bust. Her marriage was failing. Her prospects were narrowing. The world wasn’t quite against her – but it wasn’t with her either. Riffing on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel about the end of reading, Tinderbox is one of the most interesting books in decades about literary culture and its place in the world. More than that, it’s about how every one of us fits into that bigger picture – and the struggle to make sense of life in the twenty-first century. Ironically enough for a book about failures in art, Tinderbox itself is a fantastic achievement: a wonderfully crafted and beautifully written work of non-fiction that is by turns brilliantly funny and achingly sad. Tinderbox is one of the most successful books about failure you will ever read. Praise for Tinderbox: ‘Megan Dunn’s writing is utterly modern, sharp, unsentimental and beautiful; she tells a gripping story laced with humour and pathos. She is a writer to watch.’ - Michèle Roberts ‘Megan Dunn possesses a rare combination of assets – a highly original voice, great subject matter, enormous insight and serious literary ambition. Plus, she’s funny. Her work leaps off the page and makes the reader want more.’ - Kate Pullinger “It’s already one of my favourite New Zealand books.” – Hera Lindsay Bird, The Spinoff “Megan Dunn is a comic genius.” – Susanna Andrew, Metro “A wonderful, restless, formally daring first book” – James Cook, Review 31 Praise for Things I Learned at Art School: “It is, quite simply, a work of brilliance. It is an intelligent, sharp, and incisive body of work.” – Lana Lopesi, Metro “Dunn has an extraordinary facility with tone, an ability to be consistently funny while telling sad stories.” – David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books. “A rich, rewarding, funny and poignant memoir.” – Sally Blundell, Academy of New Zealand Literature “Dunn takes the reader on a digressive, funny and unflinching journey through late-20th-century New Zealand.” – Paula Morris, New Zealand Listener “As Megan Dunn makes clear in her wise, witty and wonderful memoir, the seeds of a creative life will bloom in the most unexpected of places.” – Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side
