Specify Books In Favor Of Against the Day
| Original Title: | Against the Day |
| ISBN: | 159420120X (ISBN13: 9781594201202) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Locus Award Nominee for Best SF Novel (2007), Βραβείο Λογοτεχνικής Μετάφρασης ΕΚΕΜΕΛ for Αγγλόφωνη Λογοτεχνία (2010), International Dublin Literary Award Nominee (2008) |
Thomas Pynchon
Hardcover | Pages: 1085 pages Rating: 4.13 | 6285 Users | 785 Reviews
Rendition To Books Against the Day
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, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty 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.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
--Thomas Pynchon
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 and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
Describe Out Of Books Against the Day
| Title | : | Against the Day |
| Author | : | Thomas Pynchon |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 1085 pages |
| Published | : | November 21st 2006 by Penguin Press |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Literature. Science Fiction. Steampunk |
Rating Out Of Books Against the Day
Ratings: 4.13 From 6285 Users | 785 ReviewsCriticize Out Of Books Against the Day
I loved traveling along the four parallel storylines of this, the longest of Pynchon's books. I think I fell in love with Dahlia Rideout (sorry Kit). I wanted to be one of the Chums of Chance or at least read their books to my kid with the Hardy Boys. I wanted to have a whiskey with Lew Basnight (although I may have been terrified). I loved the bad guys and the good guys and really all the characters here. There was so much to enjoy, so much to think about, never a dull moment. Of all ofNot much to say about this one, despite its classic status and gargantuan size. It's typical Pynchon, with a little less paranoia and a little more anti-industrialism. The side effect of this is more clarity in the writing--critics apparently caught onto this and called it Pynchon's "most accessible book." I wouldn't say that, necessarily, but I would say that when you write about paranoia, your writing is automatically going to be a bit murkier than it might otherwise be, since you can never
This is a rather long read, but I, for my part, will be brief. It takes more than a thousand pages for the Chums of Chance to fly over the Chicago World Fair, Colorados railroad and mining facilities, London and Venice and Vienna and Shambhala and the North Pole, anarchists and dynamite freedom fighters, gunslinger in Nochecita, a sexy aristocrat named Chirpingden-Groin, photography and conjuring, electromagnetism and alchemy, vectorial and quaternionist mathematicians, Professors Renfrew and
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Dying-Off Readership: "Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon(original review, 2006)Art is a social medium, a material medium, an intellectual medium, an economic medium: it consists of a great deal more than surfaces. Art that consisted only of surfaces - if such a thing were possible - would be of no larger significance than a crossword puzzle. This is true even of painting - the only art whose medium can be credibly represented as being
An amazing book, describing a time of turmoil and discovery, showing the best and worst of mankind and individual men and women. This multifaceted story begins at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and ends after the world altering events of World War I. The world is moving into new areas; armies on horseback are giving way to men with machine guns. The wide open West of the United States is being increasingly hemmed in by wealthy industrialists who hire "goons" with guns to break strikes. In
Alexander Theroux's review of Against the Day in the Wall Street Journal, November 2006:"Against the Day -- the phrase seems to allude to the apocalyptic conditional: In the familiar scriptural locution, the day itself was the eventual one of "judgment and perdition of the ungodly men." But let's not make too much of it. There is simply too much going on in this wide-ranging, encyclopedic, nonpareil of a novel to reduce it all to something as small as the apocalypse."Against the Day is Mr.
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