Thomas Pynchon AGAINST THE DAY Reading Group
Book Beat is helping to sponsor a monthly or bimonthly/occasional reading group for those interested in discussing Thomas Pynchon's epic novel AGAINST THE DAY. The next meeting will be at Book Beat on Tuesday, November 6th at 7:00 PM. We will be covering through pages 863. If you would be interested in attending this discussion group and would like more information, please RSVP the bookstore, via phone 248-968-1190 or email. We are offering a reading group discount of 20% off on this title.
Pynchon himself describes Against the Day as 1,000 pages of "stupid songs, strange sexual practices... obscure languages" and "contrary-to-the-fact occurrences".
Read a review of Pynchon by Ian Rankin from the Guardian at: PYNCHON / GUARDIAN.
For links to reviews in Bookforum, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Guradian, The LA Times, New York Review of Books, etc., click on: Against the Day, THE COMPLETE REVIEW.
"Authorial sympathy in Pynchon's novels always lies on the 'transcend all questions of power', countercultural side of the struggle; that's where the good guys --the oddballs, dropouts, and hapless dreamers -- tend to gather. But his books also dramatize the perception that resistance to domination can develop into its own regime of domination. The tendency of extremes is to meet, and perfection in life is a false Grail, a foreclosure of possibility, a kind of death. Of binaries beware." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker
In "Against the Day," his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives." -- Liesl Scillinger, New York Times.