Pynchon mention in Salon.com article

[Doug Millison]

"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."