The American novelist Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) is best known for V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon, complex fictions noted for their encyclopedic erudition and parodistic, labyrinthine plots. Thomas Ruggle...
Thomas Pynchon 's ancestral roots go deep into the soil of America--an appropriate genealogy for a writer whose overriding concern in his fictional project is the construction of "America" and the necessary conditions for living within that construction....
Thomas Pynchon 's willingness to address the most important cultural and social issues makes him an important writer. He depicts the plight of contemporary humanity caught in, rather than sustained by, a culture that celebrates technology and death rathe...
Mason & Dixon, an epic postmodernist novel by Thomas Pynchon first published in 1997, centers on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great...
THIS may not be the most promising way to begin a book review, but I should admit at the outset that I haven't exactly read the novel under discussion. Or rather, I read the first fifty pages and then gave up, having found nothing...
SOMETIMES THINGS ARE WHAT THEY seem. For years it was rumored (beginning, if you want to get picky, in this magazine) that Thomas Pynchon was writing a novel about the MasonDixon line. But anyone who knows anything about Pynchon knew that it couldn't be...
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council will hold its first session on the post-electoral crisis in Zimbabwe next week and South Africa will not oppose it, South Africa's U.N. envoy said Friday. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo of South Africa said someone from the...
In the following review, Wood offers unfavorable assessment of Mason and Dixon, finding fault in Pynchon's equivocal allegories and indeterminate multiple meanings.
In the following review, Gray offers favorable assessment of Mason and Dixon. According to Gray, Pynchon "transforms what might have been a merely amusing historical novel into a moving and profound meditation on the search for truth."
