Mason & Dixon
10 best books like Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon): The Tunnel, The Public Burning, JR, Darconville’s Cat, Women and Men, The Gold Bug Variations, Giles Goat-Boy, Ratner's Star, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, Fathers and Crows
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 1564782131 |
Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0802135277 |
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the...
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0140187073 |
J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money...
| Author | Alexander Theroux |
| ISBN | 0805043659 |
The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.
The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names...
| Author | Joseph McElroy |
| ISBN | 1564780236 |
Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding...
| Author | Richard Powers |
| ISBN | 0060975008 |
A Source of Meditative Awe
As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe".
Although,...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240864 |
MJ Nicholls inquires:
"I have been tempted to read this for some time, but Nate's review put me off. What do you make of his thoughts?:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..."
The first part.
I am an not an impartial commentator on John Barth's work. I...
Avoiding Cosmic Fake News
Every community of human beings has its own way of thinking about things, its rules for connecting words and experiences. These rules constitute the community’s epistemology. Epistemology determines who to believe, what is valid and true, and ‘what counts’...
| Author | Zak Smith |
| ISBN | 0977312798 |
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), set in an alternative-universe version of World War II, has been called a modern Finnegan’s Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each...
| Author | William T. Vollmann |
With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, William T. Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World. It is 400 years ago, and the Black Gowns, French Jesuit priests, are beginning their descent...
| Author | Steven Weisenburger |
| ISBN | 0820310263 |
This Companion was extremely beneficial in reading Pynchon's novel, especially giving reference to the social context and pop culture allusions that appear on nearly every page. However, I had to often set it aside, only referring back to it every so often since there was so much information that it...
