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ISBN: 9780698143241
"Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?
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Summary
Summary
A #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller
A 2013 National Book Award Finalist
A 2013 New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A 2013 New York Times Editor’s Choice
A Wall Street Journal bestseller
A USA Today bestseller
A 2013 Entertainment Weekly Best Book for Fiction
A 2013 Washington Post Notable Book
A Barnes & Noble Best Book for September 2013
A Publishers Weekly bestseller
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books for Fiction for 2013
"Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th.
Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.
Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
Hey. Who wants to know?
Editorial Reviews
Editorial Reviews
“Exemplary…Dazzling
and ludicrous…Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should
gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but
delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affectation for his
people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern
condition of being only partly real.” —New York Times Book Review
“Brilliantly
written…A joy to read…Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies
within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is
totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon
around, doing what he does best.” —Washington Post
“A precious freak of
a novel, glinting rich and strange, like a black pearl from an oyster,
unfathomable by any other diver into our eternal souls. If not here at the end
of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the
punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew
you needed…A necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting
for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past
midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day.” —Slate
“Surely now Pynchon
must be in line for the Nobel Prize?…Thomas Pynchon, America’s greatest
novelist, has written the greatest novel about the most significant events in
his country’s 21st century history. It is unequivocally a masterpiece.” —Scotsman (UK)
The book’s real
accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation
of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy,
meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century…As usual,
Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving
us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a
series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused
frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will
help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a
lot like life.” —Wired
“Brilliant and
wonderful…Bleeding Edge chronicles
the birth of the now—our terrorism-obsessed, NSA-everywhere, smartphone
Panopticon zeitgeist—in the crash of the towers. It connects the dots, the
packets, the pixels. We are all part of this story. We are all characters in
Pynchon’s mad world. Bleeding Edge is
a novel about geeks, the Internet, New York, and 9/11. It is funny, sad,
paranoid, and lyrical. It was difficult to put down. I want to read it again.” —Salon
“A hilarious, shrewd,
and disquieting metaphysical mystery.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A much-anticipated
return, and it’s trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor,
and broad-sweeping bad vibes.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“No one, but no one,
rivals Pynchon’s range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix
of dirty jokes, dread, and shining decency…Bleeding
Edge is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it
sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces.” —Publishers Weekly
“Truly your most important
reading for the fall...Darkly hilarious.” —Library Journal
***A New York Times Notable Book of 2013*** —
Brilliantly written… a joy to read…Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best. —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
A precious freak of a novel, glinting rich and strange, like a black pearl from an oyster unfathomable by any other diver into our eternal souls. If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed… a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day. —Slate.com
—
Are you ready for Thomas (Screaming Comes Across the Sky) Pynchon on the subject of September 11, 2001?... Exemplary… dazzling and ludicrous… Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. —Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review
“Surely now Pynchon must be in line for the Nobel Prize?... Thomas Pynchon, America’s greatest novelist, has written the greatest novel about the most significant events in his country’s 21st century history. It is unequivocally a masterpiece. —The Scotsman (UK)
The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions — between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos — through which he has framed the last half-century… As usual, Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life. —Wired magazine
The New York of late 2001 was a Pynchon novel waiting to happen, in which the failures of ‘late capitalist’ speculation, in the form of the recently deflated tech bubble, meet 9/11 to form the 21st century’s Year Zero. —New York Observer
Pynchon's prose is irresistible. It's playful and bustling — cheesy puns rub elbows with Big Ideas. A- —Entertainment Weekly
Brilliant and wonderful… Bleeding Edge chronicles the birth of the now — our terrorism-obsessed, NSA-everywhere, smartphone Panopticon zeitgeist — in the crash of the towers. It connects the dots, the packets, the pixels. We are all part of this story. We are all characters in Pynchon’s mad world. Bleeding Edge is a novel about geeks, the Internet, New York and 9/11. It is funny, sad, paranoid and lyrical. It was difficult to put down. I want to read it again. —Salon.com
“Bleeding Edge takes the messy, funny, and sad all-at-once world we live in and reflects it back to us in a way that I can only call consoling—somebody else out there gets it. No matter how crazy things became in this book, I felt safe as long as I was inside its pages. So of course as soon as I finished it, I started over again. —Malcolm Jones, Daily Beast/Newsweek
“Bleeding Edge may be the book Thomas Pynchon was born to write. —New York Daily News, “Page Views”
The ingeniously whimsical, accessible story of a New York City fraud investigator who becomes entangled with some very sketchy characters as she tries to get to the bottom of a case involving a tech billionaire. —O: The Oprah Magazine
Showstopping…The future that [Pynchon] so precociously, disturbingly foresaw long ago now surges around us. With Bleeding Edge, he shows that he has mastered the move from the shock of the new to the shock of the now, while cushioning the blow. —Leisl Schillinger, Barnes & Noble
“Bleeding Edge is vintage Pynchon, a louche yarn of rollicking doomism. Pynchon is the master of technology-as-metaphor. In previous books—particularly “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow —there is a persistent, shadowy suggestion of an unseen system, mechanisms that underlie the perceived reality of events. And these mechanisms are often manifest in the vagaries of things like rocket science and radio broadcasting tools. In those old books, however, the obscure schema was cast as an almost magical or mystical force, but as Bleeding Edge appears, we have the real thing.
Fabulously entertaining … Bleeding Edge is stuffed with gorgeous passages that sing their longing for all we’ve lost, in trashing the land and ourselves. But such writing is also a stirring call to arms, making clear that the history we’ll make depends on what and how we remember. As Pynchon has been reminding us for 50 years, there’s always more than one way to tell that story. —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a masterpiece of post- and pre-9/11 paranoia. —Las Vegas Weekly"A hilarious, shrewd, and disquieting metaphysical mystery.
"A much-anticipated return, and it’s trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes. —Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)
"Truly your most important reading for the fall... darkly hilarious. —Library Journal
—
Author
Author Bio: Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon has written several acclaimed novels and was a MacArthur Fellow. In addition to a National Book Award, he has received the William Dean Howells Award of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, which named Gravity’s Rainbow the best novel of the decade.
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Details
Details
| Available Formats : | Digital Download |
| Category: | Fiction |
| Runtime: | 18.64 |
| Audience: | Adult |
| Language: | English |
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