Word: pynchon
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...MASON & DIXON (Henry Holt) Thomas Pynchon's vast novel retraces the progress of the men who drew the line between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. For all its Pynchonesque tomfooleries--a talking dog, a four-ton cheese--the tale is somber, elegiac. Mason and Dixon come to realize that their triumph means an end to the wilderness, the imposition of order on "the realm of the Sacred...
Anthologies tend to lend themselves to filler, but not one of the stories included in The Best American Short Stories disappoints. In a year of monster tomes--Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles--this collection shows that the short story promises to outlive the long novel for good reason...
Though his current employment means he is no longer the J.D. Salinger of the movies, Malick can still lay claim to being their Thomas Pynchon. While allowing journalists to visit the set of The Thin Red Line (and acting the gracious host in an informal, off-the-record chat), he continues to refuse formal interviews, something he hasn't done since a 1974 chat with Women's Wear Daily. Indeed, his last recorded comment of any kind was, "Well, I, I, uh, I guess I don't want to talk about it..." when journalist David Handelman cold-called...
...area resembles not so much a city as a computer motherboard or a printed circuit. As Thomas Pynchon describes it through the eyes of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate...
...contemporary readers, beguiled by everything electronic, willing to do the hard, head-scratching work that Pynchon's uncompromising prose demands? Perhaps not; tough books are unfashionable at the moment. But those who beg off the long journey through Mason & Dixon will deprive themselves of a unique and miraculous experience...