“... to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere ...”

“... Throughout, there is an intriguing tension between the book’s desire, approaching that of a Thomas Pynchon novel, to set wheels turning within wheels, to present a political world of infinite complexity and, ultimately, chaos, and its desire for order, both organisational and moral. Peace loves describing meetings. He lingers over the rituals of ...”

“... Seventeen years have passed since the publication of Pynchon’s immense Gravity’s Rainbow, during which time exegesis has continued more or less unabated. It is accompanied by tireless speculation as to what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J ...”

“... way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow Near the end of The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway suddenly says: ‘I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all.’ It is a comment which might be made about American literature as a whole: writing about America turns ...”

“... itself.’ The literary idea of a world oscillating between order and entropy goes back to Thomas Pynchon in the Sixties: but cyberpunk has given it a more specifically political slant. Gibson’s novels are futuristic allegories of Reaganism, projections of the contrast between the booming of America’s sunbelt suburbs and the crumbling of its ...”

“... was given a further boost by a rare, cryptic – and surprisingly ungainly – endorsement from Thomas Pynchon, who described Mills’s novel as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’ with ‘the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud’. Later, a great deal of ...”

“... that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a lot from Thomas Pynchon. He has learned, for example, the potentially disastrous lesson that it’s possible to write a novel of ideas that’s vast in scope and light, even jaunty, in tone – to write about physics and farting side by side, not just as an exercise ...”

“... neon and rain. But Gibson – ‘very much under the influence of Robert Stone’, as well as Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs – was among the first to find a centre-stage role for information technology in his future scenarios. His stories were set in a world of porous borders, where multinationals and crime cartels had arrogated most of the ...”

“... But it suited everyone to disregard this fact. Today, with the dubious and decadent exception of Thomas Pynchon, there are no longer any white male novelists of the highest class below pensionable age in the United States. This gap may be amply filled by genre fiction, by female, ethnic and minority-group writers – not to mention the novelists of the ...”

“... It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less disappeared from ...”

“... The Public Works Trilogy (1997), was a deeply whimsical, cod-Vonnegut satire on Ayn Rand. Thomas Pynchon, who was frequently guyed in it, described the book as ‘dizzyingly readable’, and his words have been borrowed to puff the new novel, too. On the whole, they still hold good: Set This House in Order is pretty hard to put down. As with the ...”

“... in many of his stories, but deflation (political, personal, aesthetic) is the usual end point. Thomas Pynchon once described Barthelme’s melancholy as ‘specifically urban’, but it’s also the mood of a particular time and class. His protagonists fret about la vie quotidienne (they use the French) – ‘What made us think that we could escape ...”

“... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... Fonseca, who is now 83, has been one of those famously reticent writers – he’s a friend of Thomas Pynchon – who chooses to say as little as he can about what his fiction is meant to mean. One of the distractions his biography throws up is that he worked for the Rio police in the 1950s and 1960s: this is supposed to give him a licence to write ...”