A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49

A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 PDF Author: J. Kerry Grant
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
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.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594608
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
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.

A Companion to V.

A Companion to V. PDF Author: J. Kerry Grant
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820322506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon PDF Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion PDF Author: Steven C. Weisenburger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
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."

Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594659
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 885

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Book Description
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.

Slow Learner

Slow Learner PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594616
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
"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."

Vineland

Vineland PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594632
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
"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.”

A Hand to Turn the Time

A Hand to Turn the Time PDF Author: Theodore D. Kharpertian
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838633618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
A study of the major fiction of Thomas Pynchon in three contexts: Menippean satire, post-modernism, and American writing. The critical genealogy of the term satire is discussed and Pynchon's V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are analyzed.

Thomas Pynchon in Context

Thomas Pynchon in Context PDF Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108752705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 782

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Book Description
Thomas Pynchon in Context guides students, scholars and other readers through the global scope and prolific imagination of Pynchon's challenging, canonical work, providing the most up-to-date and authoritative scholarly analyses of his writing. This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Times and Places', sets out the history and geographical contexts both for the setting of Pynchon's novels and his own life. The second, 'Culture, Politics and Society', examines twenty important and recurring themes which most clearly define Pynchon's writing - ranging from ideas in philosophy and the sciences to humor and pop culture. The final part, 'Approaches and Readings', outlines and assesses ways to read and understand Pynchon. Consisting of Forty-four essays written by some of the world's leading scholars, this volume outlines the most important contexts for understanding Pynchon's writing and helps readers interpret and reference his literary work.