“... At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do ...”

“... part of an author’s mystique, whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days self-promotion, the business of presenting to the world your trauma or cheekbones (ideally both), is not optional, as real-life examples can ...”

“... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...”

“... home in both American and European traditions, and in all historical periods. He cut his teeth on Pynchon and is versed in Gass and Barth. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Romanian postmodernist and oneiric literature, and has taught literary history at the University of Bucharest. His own fiction weaves realism with dream, memory, myth and parable; he ...”

“... Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his ...”

“... a girl looking after a wounded bird.’ The bird flew back to Amherst that autumn. The lesson of Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern’s running mate who dropped out of the 1972 election after it was reported that he’d undergone electroshock therapy, meant Wallace could forget about politics: ‘No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a ...”

“... Tokarczuk is. For The Books of Jacob takes its place alongside the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez; and it may be said to rival even New Athens itself, of which the equally historical poet Elżbieta Drużbacka says: ‘This volume is so strangely magical that an endless reading is permitted in which one picks and ...”

“... and Woolf, to a conclusion in the Post-Modernist and supra-national fictions of Beckett, Pynchon and Nabokov. The strongest element in Death Sentences, as in Stewart’s earlier Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, are the close readings, which are strikingly clever. The literary-historical coverage is conservative, and awkwardly national. Not to ...”

“... important and innovative as that of any previous period.’ A shared perception of Bellow, Pynchon, Orton, Heaney, Fowles and Vonnegut as men of the moment or at least of the decade gives a common tone to the critiques of Bradbury and his team, and the slim volumes of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series interact as the chapters of the Pelican Guide ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... more dirtily, as befitted the scruffy student I had become, from the Trystero conspiracy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. One gets it less, though, as one gets older. You know too much about how the world works to be so easily taken in.The way the books are marketed only confuses the boundaries further. My own three-volume paperback has ...”