V.

Publishing Details

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Description

The first novel by the incomparable Thomas Pynchon. The first novel from the great, incomparable Thomas Pynchon. The quest for V. sweeps us through sixty years and a panorama of Alexandria, Paris, Malta, Florence, Africa and New York. But who, where or what is V. Bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious, V. as become a modern classic. 'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian 'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker

Reviews

A remarkable book * Sunday Telegraph *
To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover * New Yorker *
[Pynchon's] ambitions in V. are prodigious, enough to demand comparison less with Perelman than with the Joyce of the Circe episode of Ulysses * New York Review of Books 1963 *
The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation -- Ian Rankin * Guardian *
[Pynchon] writes richer comedy than most card-carrying comic novelists, filling his eight novels with hilarious spoofs, outlandish characters, screwball dialogue and zany scenarios * Guardian *
Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other * Books and Bookmen *
The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one * Time *
Mr Pynchon writes with enormous skill and virtuosity * Times Literary Supplement. *

Author Bio

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.