Word: pynchon
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Ordinary novelists have readers. Thomas Pynchon has decoders. Anyone who has ventured into the manic densities of Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon knows the drill. You comb through his superabundance of historical data and scientific arcana. You adjust your nerve endings to operate at his mad frequencies. Day after day you resume the steep ascent of his achievement and just hope to make camp before nightfall...
...world that travel, communications and other technologies have created can likewise seem as if moved by mystic forces. If Lost is a jungle of quasi-shamanistic kismet, it resonates because our world appears that way too. In Babel, Heroes and their forebears--from Magnolia to the novels of Thomas Pynchon--even if the connections may be contrived, they feel authentic. That guy in the next car on the freeway could change my life someday! If I save the cheerleader, I can save the world...
...rarely find novelists on network or even cable TV, and radio outlets also favor non-fiction. Beyond print ads, most publicity for fiction comes from book tours and soliciting reviews or author profiles, but most newspapers have cut back on space devoted to High Lit. Ironically, although Pynchon's penchant for privacy may have its origins in his personal philosophy, it's also been a great hook for journalists to cover (or uncover) him over the years...
...listing is back up, and the Pynchon-penned teaser is downright tantalizing: "Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead...
...Some bookstores around the country are holding "Pynchon Nights" and others may schedule special events around the new book's release. But Penguin is deliberately keeping hands off such hoopla. "We're respecting the author's choice for us to stay apart from these things," says the Penguin rep. "Oh my god, that book will sell itself - there's a built-in audience of his fans," says Charles Day, marketing manager at the popular West Hollywood, California retailer Book Soup. Day expects to trumpet the release with large window displays, staff recommendations, and prominent placement of the hefty volumes near...