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 an...

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 ...

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significa...

Thomas Pynchon’s fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon’s representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether q...

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

**Winner of the 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 implication...

Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy from the Queen of Britain: the rascal-Fool Pocket.This trio of cunning plotters—the merchant, Antonio; the senator, Montressor Brabantio; and the naval officer, Iago—have lured Pocket to a dark dungeon, promising an evening of sprits and debauchery with a rare Amontillado sherry and Brabantio's beautiful daughter, Portia.But their invitation is, of course...

"A brilliant biography. . . . The joys are . . . discovering the autobiographical content of the . . . details that populate Updike's vast fictional universe." —Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times Book ReviewAdam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, Pulitzer prize–winning novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing "middle...

A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While co...

On March 19, 2013, a distinguished group of writers and critics gathered at the Newark Museum’s Billy Johnson Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, to celebrate the extraordinary career and lasting literary legacy of Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This keepsake volume gathers remarks from the evening’s speakers, a fitting tribute to the only living novelist whose work is collected in the Library of America series. Here you’ll find Jonathan Lethem, hilariously recounting his ...

The Complete Works of Margaret Hill McCarterMargaret Hill McCarter was an American teacher and novelist.This collection includes the following:Vanguards of the PlainsA Master's DegreeWinning the WildernessThe Price of the PrairieThe Reclaimers

Charting a new course in the criticism of postwar fiction, Cool Characters examines the changing status of irony in American cultural and political life from World War II to the present, showing how irony migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the cultural mainstream of the 1980s. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately became a target of recent writers who have sought to create a practice of “postirony” that might move beyond its...