Wow, the wait is finally over! (for those of us that were waiting, that is.) This Christmas, Thomas Pynchon will be publishing his first novel since 1997's Mason & Dixon. Apparently Amazon had a description of the currently untitled 992-page novel up on their site last week for a day or two before it was removed. Thanks to the Pynchon-centric blog Pynchonoid, however, we've still got the info. Supposedly a revised/official description will go back on Amazon this week or next.
For the impatient, here's what Pynchonoid grabbed:
Book Description
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
About the Author
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
- Hardcover: 992 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (December 5, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 159420120X
Lots of good news today! First a new Pernice Brothers album, now a new Pynchon book. My fall & winter are shaping up quite nicely so far.
[via Rakes Progress.]
Update: Publicists at Penguin have denied that they supplied this book description to Amazon, so this could all be an elaborate hoax. Then again Nick & Jessica denied they were getting divorced for months, and that was true. Never trust publicists.
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