Literature

The Crying of September 11

“Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.”

November 7, 2013 issue

What Happened at Gordita Beach?

“The surfing and doping world of late-Sixties California offers Pynchon something similar to the forms of popular poetry and song that support the later work of García Márquez, the ballads and boleros full of broken hearts and eternal love. No thought is banal if it is up to something.”

September 24, 2009 issue

Inside the Time Machine

“[Against the Day] may appear titanic and overwhelming from a distance, but close up it is oddly homespun, friendly, accommodating, and free of such oppressions as symmetry and hierarchy.”

January 11, 2007 issue

Entropology

“The narrative machinery just seems to crank out one fabulous yarn after another. The book is, in short, in no great rush about getting nowhere in particular: it is novelistically ‘on the road.’”

June 12, 1997 issue

Any Place You Want

“Pynchon displays throughout Vineland what might be called an internal loyalty: he keeps the faith with the generally feckless and almost invariably inarticulate misfits he assembles, tracking their looping thoughts and indecisive actions with a patience that seems grounded in affection.”

March 15, 1990 issue

Rocketing to the Apocalypse

“Gravity’s Rainbow, like many other modern novels, like all novels in one sense, is set in the writer’s mind, but Pynchon’s mind, by virtue of his imaginative anxiety or historical care, is full not only of personal obsessions…but also of more major recent historical deposits than it seems a single mind could take.”

March 22, 1973 issue

Fiction à la Mode

“Pynchon is again whispering something in our ear about the meaning of coincidence, the possibility of recurrence in history, and the circularity of time…. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of those mystery novels that can’t be solved.”

June 23, 1966 issue

Cook’s Tour

“Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them.”

June 1, 1963 issue

Intentionality

I remember wanting to be in a band when I was nine.

October 8, 2023

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life. 

September 29, 2023

Dear Judy

Judy Blume gave voice to many of the feelings I experienced during adolescence, but there were some she didn’t name.

August 11, 2023

Love’s Work

In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.

July 13, 2023