Against the Day - by Thomas Pynchon (Paperback)

About the Book

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, and elsewhere.

Book Synopsis

"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant." --USA Today

"Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling." --The Boston Globe

Spanning the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Review Quotes

"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"Those who climb aboard Pynchon's airship will have the ride of their lives. History lesson, mystical quest, utopian dream, experimental metafiction, Marxist melodrama, Marxian comedy--Against the Day is all of these things and more." --The Washington Post Book World

"Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant." --USA Today

"Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling." --The Boston Globe

"Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

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