George Levine, David Leverenz (Editors)

Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon.

Little, Brown and Company, 1976. First edition. 0316522309 ix/272 pages.

Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 8.75", is bound in black spine cover and black paper-covered boards, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book displays very light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket exhibits wear at edges and minor loss it upper outside corner of rear panel. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.

""Mindful Pleasures" is the first collection of critical essays on Thomas Pynchon. Though his novels "V", "The Crying of Lot 49", and "Gravity's Rainbow" have won Pynchon wide recognition as a major force in American literature, mystery cloaks the author and argument rages over his works. Praised for his wild leaps of imagination, risk-taking prose, and bitter humor, he has also been criticized as merely clever, a heartless manipulator of structures rather than characters, a decadent virtuoso. In this volume, George Levine and David Leverenz have assembled the most telling insights on Pynchon to date, from rising younger writers and from established critics like Richard Poirier and Tony Tanner.

The essays range over Pynchon's early short stories; his interweaving of imagined fiction with known history; his verbal games, symbols and puns; his fascination with entropy, information theory, and the Calvinist distinction of elect from preterite; his debts to writers as diverse as Melville, Norbert Wiener, and William Burroughs; and his seeming love for sustaining readers' uncertainty. The authors present a variety of approaches to the ambiguous magnum opus, "Gravity's Rainbow" (originally entitled "Mindless Pleasures"), yet there is scant ground for any critical consensus..."