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  • Published: 1 October 2014
  • ISBN: 9780099590361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $29.99

Bleeding Edge




Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire...

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her licence got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mum - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighbourhood - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. 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, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

  • Published: 1 October 2014
  • ISBN: 9780099590361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Also by Thomas Pynchon

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Praise for Bleeding Edge

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.

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

It’s dense, complex and riotously, ridiculously funny.

Esquire

The looming shadow of 9/11 touches every page. Nonetheless, many of those pages are outrageously funny, others are sexy, touchingly domestic, satirical or deeply mysterious. All are brilliantly written in Pynchon’s characteristically revved-up, even slightly over-revved style – a joy to read… Swarms with amazing characters… 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, Washington Post

Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, is the best and most surprising thing he’s written since those great books… The jokes in this novel, incidentally, are superb, with the comic tone perhaps a career high point.

Tim Martin, Telegraph

Part thriller, part detective story, it’s a vibrant portrait of a city on the cusp of change.

Sonia Juttla, Sunday Telegraph

[Pynchon’s] eighth novel is something of a return to form, and could well be his best since his comeback… Offers a winning heroine, scintillating screwball dialogue and a typical host of weird, zany or depraved characters, this time corralled into a tighter-than-usual plot.

John Dugdale, Sunday Times

Entropic in its plottery and joyously paranoid in its world view… My advice: read it, but don’t try to follow it. It’ll make you giddy.

John Sutherland, The Times

There’s plenty of space within the pattern for Pynchon’s trademark digressions…songs, terrible puns…and some magnificent set pieces.

Thomas Jones, Financial Times

Though Bleeding Edge doesn’t stint on leftish theorizing about far-right misdeeds, it also gives the sense that for the first time Pynchon is looking at things from a very great height, as a battle between toy soldiers.

Leo Robson, New Statesman

The new novel by the reclusive Pynchon is set in New York in 2001 and follows a fraud investigator who takes on more than she bargains for when she checks out a billionaire internet tycoon.

Mail on Sunday

[Pynchon’s] working towards a sort of metaphysics of our accelerated, encrypted world; he’s positing that once you reach a certain bandwidth, classical notions of space and time, and even maybe the unitary indivisible soul, break down.

Keith Miller, Literary Review

Routinely extraordinary but also wonderfully funny, regularly gripping and, whisper it, engaging…

Hugh MacDonald, Herald

Beneath the constant wordplay and manic invention there’s serious intent; the intensity of Pynchon’s prose can be a demanding slog but stay the course and you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

Ben Felsenburg, Metro

Pynchon has a particular gift for apprehending a scene, for conveying the resonance of objects and understanding their role in our lives.

Jennifer Szalai, Prospect

The narrative voice of Bleeding Edge is warmer: it’s omniscient and at times essayistic but more often casual, chatty and in the present tense. Pynchon has an almost fatherly fondness for his characters… He takes an obvious pleasure in the game: in his gags and obscurities, in storytelling, and in chronicling the wasted days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out.

Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books

Bleeding Edge is an elegiac yet compulsively readable novel. The humour crackles, eliciting chuckles on almost every page. No one works magic with words like Pynchon, and here he is at the height of his powers, by turns gripping, thought-provoking, inventive, touching and poetic, not to mention warmly human.

Sean Carroll, Nature

Pynchon makes interesting observations about life, there are lovely twists of lyricism throughout, the dialogue is punchy and believable, the jokes are funny.

Darragh McManus, Irish Independent

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

Time

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

David Barrett, Standpoint

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

James Kidd, Independent on Sunday

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

Jo Ellison and Violet Henderson, Vogue

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

Irish Examiner

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

Tom Stoppard, Guardian

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

Tim Martin, Telegraph

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

Uncut

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

Michael Dirda, Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

Gordon Brewer, Herald

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

Financial Times

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

Gordon Brewer, Scotsman

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

Mail on Sunday

Playful and paranoid New York noir

Adam Boulton, New Statesman

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

Stephen Joyce, Nudge
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