Until you’ve consumed all of the best Thomas Pynchon books, can you even claim to be a true fan?
1. The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library) (2006)
Thomas Pynchon’s classic post-modern satire, which tells the wonderfully unusual story of Oedipa Maas, first published in 1965.When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Mass 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….
2. Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (2006)
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity’s Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce’s Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the…
3. V. (Perennial Classics) (2005)
The 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….
4. Bleeding Edge: A Novel (2014)
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con…
5. Vineland (1990)
Brand New Never Read- Light Shelf Wear…
6. Mason & Dixon: A Novel (2004)
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…
7. Inherent Vice: A Novel (2010)
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…
8. Against the Day (2007)
The inimitable Thomas Pynchon has done it again. Hailed as “a major work of art” by The Wall Street Journal, his first novel in almost ten years spans the era between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I and moves among locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all). With a phantasmagoria of characters and a kaleidoscopic plot, Against the Day confronts a world of impending disaster, unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places and still manages to be hilarious, moving, profound, and so much more….
9. Slow Learner: Early Stories (1985)
Thomas Pynchon’s literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, “V., ” but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here. In his introduction to “Slow Learner” the author reviews his early work with disarming candor and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written. “Time” magazine described this introductory essay as “Pynchon’s first public gesture toward autobiography.”…
10. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge Companions to Literature) (2012)
The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon’s fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon’s fiction novel-by-novel from the 1960s to the present, including such indisputable classics as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Part II zooms out to…
11. Infinite Jest (2006)
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own…
Best Thomas Pynchon Books Worth Your Attention
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Thomas Pynchon In Context
Author(s): Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Year: 2019, Size: 2 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2387852
The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
Author(s): Utku Mogultay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, Year: 2018, Size: 1 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2375481
Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender
Author(s): Joanna Freer; Georgios Maragos; Ali Chetwynd
Publisher: University of Georgia Press, Year: 2018, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2382579
Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V
Author(s): Paolo Simonetti, Umberto Rossi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Year: 2015, Size: 3 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2373900
Bleeding Edge
Author(s): Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin, Year: 2013, Size: 556 Kb, Download: epub
ID: 1018505
Gravity's Rainbow, domination, and freedom
Author(s): Herman, Luc; Weisenburger, Steven; Pynchon, Thomas
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press, Year: 2013, Size: 2 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 1425220
Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld
Author(s): Pynchon, Thomas; Smith, Evans Lansing; Pynchon, Thomas
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, Year: 2013, Size: 2 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 1434025
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are really hot items according to The New York Times, others are written by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Drop a comment if you have any feedback on the list.