IVIV (0) Distant Early Warning

[Dave Monroe]

Penguin Press announces a new Thomas Pynchon novel for August 2009
Message #6016 of 6324
Fri Sep 12, 2008 5:26 pm


according to a sales rep at Penguin (the same guy who gave me advance
notice of <Against the Day> a few years ago). No title or description
yet; will pass along info as I learn more.
Steve

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gaddis-l/message/6016
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0809&msg=128944

more on Pynchon's next
Message #6083 of 6324
Fri Sep 26, 2008 4:26 pm


The rep told me it's around 400 pages, and is a kind of noir detective
story set in the 1960s, with lots of psychedelia as background. How
groovy is that!
(Sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear to Xenu that's what he told me.)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gaddis-l/message/6083
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0809&msg=129315

Jacket Copy
Books news and information
New Thomas Pynchon book on the way?
October 3, 2008 |  8:05 am


Rumors have begun circulating that Thomas Pynchon is at work on a new
novel. And the rumors are pretty specific. Author Steven Moore has
spoken to someone connected to Pynchon:

The rep told me it's around 400 pages, and is a kind of noir detective
story set in the 1960s, with lots of psychedelia as background. How
groovy is that!

The famously reclusive Pynchon has never been known for working fast.
Fans waited 17 years after "Gravity's Rainbow" for "Vineland," and
then another seven for "Mason & Dixon." In 2006 -- after nine more
years -- "Against the Day" was published. That novel was, for some, a
return to Pynchon at his best: funny, complicated, absurd, smart.
Others had kind of a love-hate relationship to the book, like "The
Economist," which wrote:

Is it any good ? Baffling, yes. Clever and inventive in a cackling,
manic, mad-professor kind of way, yes. Intermittently warmed by
paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry, yes. Rambling,
pompous and often completely incomprehensible -- yes to all that too.

Packed with scientific ephemera, "Against the Day" was massive --
1,085 pages -- and came out less than two years ago. Some readers were
exhausted by it. Pynchon, certainly, wouldn't be blamed for taking a
rest. But here it is, 22 months since his last book, and we're hearing
news of a novel in progress that has not just a premise (noir), not
just a tone (psychedelic), but a page count! And it's due next year,
in 2009!

This rumor started on a William Gaddis mailing list. And while it
might be nothing more than an Internet rumor, the idea of an Internet
rumor fits so well into Pynchon's themes of paranoia and secret
information that fans (like me) can't help but embrace it. I'm going
to go finish the last 400 pages of "Against the Day" so I can be
ready.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/10/new-thomas-pync.html
http://www.thomaspynchon.com/inherent-vice.html