Pynchon, Thomas

Vineland

ISBN: 0316724440
Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1990. First Edition. Hardcover. "It has been seventeen years since Thomas Pynchon shocked and dazzled readers with his novel Gravity's Rainbow. Here, with Vineland, Pynchon is back, introducing a cast of individuals so quirky, so vulnerable, and so terribly ill-equipped to deal with each other that they could only hail from this world. It is 1984 in Northern California, where a group of Americans are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times, sexual and political, which have refused to die. Zoyd Wheeler is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity...when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past with news that an old nemesis, Federal Prosecutor Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Zoyd immediately goes into hiding and sends his daughter, Prairie, off with her violence-loving drummer boyfriend on a Mob wedding gig out of town...Combining elements of daytime drama and the political thriller, Vineland becomes a strange evocation of twentieth-century America- of the times we live in and the forces we live by and with- as it follows the orbits of old acquaintances headed for a less than harmonic convergence." (from front & rear flaps) The fourth novel (& fifth published work) of Thomas Pynchon, the famously reclusive, uncategorizable & highly influential giant of 20th & 21st century American fiction. Published almost two decades after his previous novel Gravity's Rainbow did indeed shock the literary world, Vineland was greeted by acclaim from expectant Pynchon-starved readers, with its uncanny, surreal & paranoid evocation of contemporary American society & culture. Hardcover in unclipped first-issue dust jacket (with $19.95 price printed on front flap), first edition as stated on copyright page, first printing as indicated by number sequence thereon. An essential Pynchon collectible classic in its rarest original form. See also our item No.s 1826, 1827, 1830, 1831 & 4608. Book in very fine condition with only a touch of fading to edges & corners of green-cloth front, back covers & spine; light spotting to upper & lower edges of text block; much less to side edge of same with several very small indent-scratches; very slight bend of upper spine toward front. Interior very fine with only very small-to-tiny faint creases at blank side margins/ edges of some page leaves (from indent-scratches noted above); otherwise substantially mint. Dust jacket fine with mild rubbing, faint scratching to front, back covers & spine; a bit of wear & some tiny bumps, creases at thin edges & corners of same & flaps. Very Fine / Fine. [Item #4655]

Price: $90.00