One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels
A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force. -- San Francisco Examiner
The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international 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.
This work may well stand as one of the very best works of the century. --Atlantic Review
Acclaimed writer Thomas Pynchon's wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men--one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose--and V., the unknown woman of the title.
Pynchon's debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists in New York known as the Whole Sick Crew along with his sidekick Pig Bodine, and the plot of Herbert Stencil, looking to find the woman he knows only as she is described in his father's diary: V.
Brimming with madcap characters, the novel meanders from New York to Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, and Africa, and traverses generations. Time magazine raves, Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one.
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 re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force. -- San Francisco Examiner
The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international 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.
This work may well stand as one of the very best works of the century. --Atlantic Review
Acclaimed writer Thomas Pynchon's wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men--one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose--and V., the unknown woman of the title.
Pynchon's debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists in New York known as the Whole Sick Crew along with his sidekick Pig Bodine, and the plot of Herbert Stencil, looking to find the woman he knows only as she is described in his father's diary: V.
Brimming with madcap characters, the novel meanders from New York to Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, and Africa, and traverses generations. Time magazine raves, Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one.
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels
The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.--New York Times
Thomas Pynchon's highly original, postmodernist classic, a satire of American life about a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a seeming international 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--including a teenage rock band called the Paranoids, a right-wing historian and critic of the postal system, and a former child actor with whom she has an affair--and begins to unravel conspiracies she suddenly sees all around her.
Written in 1966, The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates the piquant wit and power of invention that are the hallmarks of Pynchon's acclaimed works. It is the shortest of his novels, and widely held to be the benchmark of this literary lion's career.