Thomas Pynchon Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. V. (1963)
  2. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
  3. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
  4. Vineland (1990)
  5. Mason & Dixon (1997)
  6. Against the Day (2006)
  7. Inherent Vice (2009)
  8. Bleeding Edge (2013)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Mortality and Mercy in Vienna (1959)
  2. The Small Rain (1959)
  3. Low-Lands (1960)
  4. The Secret Integration (1964)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Slow Learner (1984)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction (1991)
  2. Deadly Sins (1994)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Thomas Pynchon Books Overview

V.

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.

The Crying of Lot 49

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, ‘The Crying of Lot 49‘ opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover’s estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting ‘The Crying of Lot 49‘. This is one of Pynchon’s shortest novels and one of his best.

Gravity’s Rainbow

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence, ‘a screaming comes across the sky,’ heralding an angel of death, a V 2 rocket. The novel’s title, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘, refers to the rocket’s vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘, however, doesn’t follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘ is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

Vineland

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. ‘Vineland‘ is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ‘Floozy with an Uzi’, movie spoofs Pee wee Herman in ‘The Robert Musil Story’, and illicit sex including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in ‘V’..

Mason & Dixon

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, in an updated eighteenth century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch’d 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 Revoluntionary 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.

Against the Day

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn of the century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty 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. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary to the fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck. Thomas Pynchon

Inherent Vice

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a mari*juana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. 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. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there…
or…
if you were there, then you…
or, wait, is it…

Slow Learner

Slow Learner‘ is a compilation of early stories written between 1959 and 1964, before Pynchon achieved recognition as a prominent writer for his 1963 novel, ‘V’ and containing a revelatory essay on his early influences and writing. The collection consists of five short stories: ‘The Small Rain’, ‘Lowlands’, ‘Entropy’, ‘Under the Rose’, and ‘The Secret Integration’, as well as an introduction written by Pynchon himself for the 1984 publication. The five stories were originally published individually in various literary magazines but in 1984, after Pynchon had achieved greater recognition, ‘Slow Learner‘ was published to collect and copyright the stories into one volume. The introduction also offers a rare insight into Pynchon’s own views on his work and influences.

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction

The term cyberpunk entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant garde. By bringing together original fiction by well known contemporary writers William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean Fran ois Lyotard, and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William VollmanSelected Non Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean Fran ois Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

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