Pynchon mention in Salon.com article

[Otto Sell]

So it sounds when someone has understood next to nothing.
Otto

----- Original Message ----- 
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 8:40 PM
Subject: Pynchon mention in Salon.com article


> "The death of the Red-Hot Center
>  From literary giants tapping out the Great American novel through
> multiculturalism, Kmart realism and the Brat Pack to Oprah and
> your book club: A short history of fiction after 1960."
> By Laura Miller
> 
> "Editor's note: This week Salon publishes its second book, "The 
> Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors," a guide to the 
> best and worst of contemporary fiction authors. Today, we present the 
> introduction to the "Reader's Guide" and two of the book's 225 author 
> entries, on Stephen King and Alice Walker."
> 
> http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/08/11/guide_intro/index.html
> 
> excerpt:
> 
> "However, a handful of literary novelists have been intent on 
> conveying the media-saturated texture of contemporary life, most 
> notably Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, perhaps the most critically 
> revered writers of fiction working today. These authors depict a 
> world of disorienting complexity and outlandish, even absurd events 
> often directed by unseen, sinister forces. They pack their hefty 
> novels with science, history, philosophical ruminations and dozens of 
> characters, techniques that earned them the epithet "encyclopedic." 
> The encyclopedic novelists borrowed material and themes from all 
> corners of high and popular culture, but particularly from the 
> intellectual vein of science fiction, a genre with a tradition of 
> speculation about the nature of humanity and about the more monstrous 
> aspects of complex technologies and the societies that create them. 
> (Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" was nominated for a Nebula, science 
> fiction's most prestigious award, in 1974.) The visions of writers 
> whose work resides solidly within the science-fiction genre -- 
> William Gibson and Philip K. Dick in particular -- gained wider 
> audiences as readers found startlingly prophetic reflections of 
> contemporary life in their fantastic and often outright paranoid 
> scenarios."