Against the Day - Couverture rigide

Pynchon, Thomas

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 159420120X ISBN 13 : 9781594201202

Editeur : Penguin Press HC, The, 2006

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"

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Those who climb aboard Pynchon's airship will have the ride of their lives. History lesson, mystical quest, utopian dream, experimental metafiction, Marxist melodrama, Marxian comedy- Against the Day is all of these things and more."
-The Washington Post Book World

"Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant."
-USA Today

"Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling."
-The Boston Globe

"Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high- roller, tripolar."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer

Biographie de l'auteur :

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 and, most recently, Against the Day. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Press HC, The
• Date d'édition: 2006
• ISBN 10: 159420120X
• ISBN 13: 9781594201202
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 1120