BE #1 Amazon Best Seller in "Historical Mystery"

[Ian Livingston]

I think you nailed it with your last sentence, Bekah. Soon "retro"
will mean wearing the clothes you didn't take off last night because
you were too drunk. Maybe we're reaching the point at which the
universe is finished expanding and starts to contract again, reversing
time and making "history" a reference to the future.

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have a small issue with the "historical" part of the genre description.  How "historical" can 2001 be?  Pynchon and the readers of BE were all likely adults at the time and as a result have a personal involvement - not an historical one.   Precious few books are written about the times we actually live in - they're usually set at least 3 or 4 years prior often up to 10 or so.  (Suite Francois was very surprising and Pattern Recognition was similar in its chronological proximity of setting - so to speak).
>
> What with the speed of technology (we're now exploring the real "outer" space) I suppose history is anything that happened yesterday?
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Sep 15, 2013, at 6:46 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I say give the Amazon folk credit, they nailed it. They couldn't call
>> it a Romance, or those academinc terms, postmodern, high modern, or as
>> Cowart does, roman fleuve, or hysterical...metafiction... so I like
>> it.
>>
>> The American Mystery (Tanner).
>>
>> In this wonderful little book, Tanner, from the first essay on
>> Emerson, which takes up this issue of Sloth and the Author, of Anarchy
>> and Work, we see how Pynchon fits into this American Mystery
>> tradition, again, not so Dieckensian as has been argued, nothing that
>> European, but a studied son of the American Mystery.
>>
>> The mystery softens the blunt instrument that is anything that would
>> work on 9-11 with a bleeding political edge.
>