Synopses & Reviews
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 theyre 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
Review
"[G]loriously fizzy....[A] novelist who keeps things moving. If you don't dig the anti-capitalist screeds or get hooked on Kit's revenge, no worries a few pages later you might enjoy the concept of Anarchist Golf... (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[A] grand Wellsian fantasia...a powerful act of imagination....Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended...with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline." Library Journal
Review
"There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor's New Clothes." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Although clearly this book was written without the forced-march pace of its reviewers in mind...I'm willing to grant Pynchon the benefit of the doubt. A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing, and I suspect Pynchon would be the first to suggest we skip the boring parts." Christopher Sorrentino, The Los Angeles Times
Review
"It is brilliant. It is oblique, and in some ways obtuse. Very few people will finish it. I read the whole thing in a few days, which is not an experience to be recommended." Newsday
Review
"It's as much genre-bending as mind-bending....And, who knows ask any actuary, 70 isn't that old anymore maybe another Pynchon novel? If one comes, let it be as rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling, as this one." The Boston Globe
Review
"You want goofy names, kooky groups, multi-claused, roller-coaster, Nabokovian sentences, pop-culture sarcasm, abstruse intellectual arabesques, 10-dollar words, inside jokes, fey attributions, self-parodying guides to interpretation buy Against the Day." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"[O]verstuffed with wonders....I remember more about the effort than the scenery I passed along the way." Bloomberg
Review
"[S]logging through the underbrush of the vast and quintessentially Pynchonian new Thomas Pynchon novel...it's hard not to think, almost with the turning of every page, of all the other writers who now do this better." Laura Miller, Salon
Review
"To read this book with anything like comprehension, a person has to be, like its polymath author, both intellectual and hip, a person mature and profoundly well read and yet something of a true marginal, a word-nerd with the patience of Job." Wall Street Journal
Review
"It's raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant, exasperating, and defies a simple summary." USA Today
Review
"Whether or not Pynchon writes future novels, Against the Day can be seen as his Brothers Karamazov. It ties up the loose ends of his career and shows that his past successes were not a fluke." The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
Review
"Pynchon's works are prodigies: they do everything but move us. But they certainly are prodigious....Pynchon is easy to like politically; but this book's will-to-nullification is deeply frustrating....This novel systematically denies the reader any purchase, any Archimedean position, and that is its anarchism of method: not Against the Day so much as Against Method. But 1,100 pages of antic surface is an awfully expensive way to pay for these pretty obvious splashings in skepticism." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
An epic tale spanning the years between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I features a sizable cast of characters who are caught up by such events as the labor troubles of Colorado, the Mexican revolution, and the heyday of silent-movie Hollywood. 250,000 first printing.
Synopsis
The inimitable Thomas Pynchon has done it again. Hailed as "a major work of art" by
The Wall Street Journal, his first novel in almost ten years spans the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I and moves among locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all). With a phantasmagoria of characters and a kaleidoscopic plot,
Against the Day confronts a world of impending disaster, unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places and still manages to be hilarious, moving, profound, and so much more.
Synopsis
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.