The Longest Ride
Nicholas Sparks, 2013
Grand Central Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455520640
Summary
Ira Levinson is in trouble. At ninety-one years old, in poor health and alone in the world, he finds himself stranded on an isolated embankment after a car crash.
Suffering multiple injuries, he struggles to retain consciousness until a blurry image materializes and comes into focus beside him: his beloved wife Ruth, who passed away nine years ago. Urging him to hang on, she forces him to remain alert by recounting the stories of their lifetime together—how they met, the precious paintings they collected together, the dark days of WWII and its effect on them and their families.
Ira knows that Ruth can't possibly be in the car with him, but he clings to her words and his memories, reliving the sorrows and everyday joys that defined their marriage.
A few miles away, at a local bull-riding event, a Wake Forest College senior's life is about to change. Recovering from a recent break-up, Sophia Danko meets a young cowboy named Luke, who bears little resemblance to the privileged frat boys she has encountered at school.
Through Luke, Sophia is introduced to a world in which the stakes of survival and success, ruin and reward—even life and death—loom large in everyday life. As she and Luke fall in love, Sophia finds herself imagining a future far removed from her plans—a future that Luke has the power to rewrite...if the secret he's keeping doesn't destroy it first.
Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina
Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published nearly 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.
Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.
His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.
In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.
Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.
Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.
After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.
In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.
In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.
With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.
Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.
Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.
In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Nicholas Sparks clearly knows how to tug at heartstrings and so he proves again with this tale of two love stories ... The fortunes of both romances are described with a noticeably old-fashioned tenderness which prizes love and devotion.... [Sparks] has a canny knack of tapping into what makes us human, and before you know it, you are rooting for Ira and engrossed in his life story Irish Independent A fiercely romantic and touching tale, with the added bonus of a sexy cowboy. When it comes to tales about love, Nicholas Sparks is one of the undisputed kings Heat Will suck you in and leave you a sobbing mess.
Star Magazine
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Redeemed (House of Night Series, 12)
P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast, 2014
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312594442
Summary
The final electrifying installment in the #1 New York Times bestselling vampyre series...
Zoey Redbird is in trouble. Having released the Seer Stone to Aphrodite, and surrendered herself to the Tulsa Police, she has isolated herself from her friends and mentors, determined to face the punishment she deserves—even if that means her body will reject the change, and begin to die. Only the love of those closest to her can save her from the Darkness in her spirit; but a terrible evil has emerged from the shadows, more powerful than ever…
Neferet has finally made herself known to mortals. Crowning herself a Dark Goddess, she is evil unleashed and is enslaving the citizens of Tulsa. The vampyres of the House of Night have banded with the police, and are gathering every last resource they have, but they know that no single vampyre is strong enough to vanquish her—unless that vampyre has the power to summon the elements as well as the ability to wield Old Magick. Only Zoey is heir to such power…but because of the consequences of using Old Magick, she is unable to help.
In the final novel in the House of Night series, an epic battle of Light versus Darkness will decide who is redeemed…and who is forever lost.
The House of Night series by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast is an international phenomenon, reaching #1 on U.S., German, and UK bestseller lists, and remaining a fixture on The New York Times Children’s Series bestseller list for nearly 160 weeks and counting, with more than 12 million copies in print and rights sold in thirty–eight countries to date. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Raised—the states of Oklahoma and Illinois, USA
• Education—
• Awards—
• Currently—lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Phyllis Christine Cast is an American romance/fantasy author, best known for the House of Night series she writes with her daughter Kristin Cast.
On her own, she has written the Goddess Summoning and Partholon book series, beginning with her first book, Goddess by Mistake (2001). The book won the Prism, Holt Medallion, and Laurel Wreath awards, and was a finalist for the National Readers' Choice Award. Her subsequent books have won a variety of prizes.
In 2005, she and her daughter began co-writing the House of Night series. In the wake of the current popularity of vampire fiction led by Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, the Casts' books have enjoyed substantial and increasing critical and commercial success. In March 2009, the fifth book in their series, Hunted, opened as #1 on the best-seller lists of USA Today and Wall Street Journal.
According to the author, the concept for the House of Night novels came from her agent, who suggested the idea of a vampire finishing school. The books take place in an alternative universe version of Tulsa, Oklahoma, inhabited by both humans and "vampyres." (Cast uses this alternative spelling in the books, explaining it as a choice she made "just 'cause I like the way it looks.) The protagonist, Zoey Redbird, age 16, is "marked" as a "fledgling" and moves to the "House of Night" school to undergo her transformation.
Personal information
Born in Watseka, Illinois, P.C. Cast lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she taught high school English. She has been married and divorced three times. In June 2010, Cast wrote about her marriages and her current personal relationship with Seoras Wallace, a Scottish historian and chieftain of Clan Wallace, whom she met while researching her novel The Avenger. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/11/2014.)
Book Reviews
Twilight meets Harry Potter
MTV.com (on The House of Night series)
This amazing writing pair once again weaves together a world where rising darkness threatens and brave teens risk everything (4 ½ stars).
RT Book Reviews (on Destined)
The saga of the House of Night series continues to smolder in Burned . . . fast paced and packed with mystery, suspense, and romance, this book is a hard one to put down.
Voya (on Burned)
Both intense and thoroughly entertaining....this outing will not disappoint House of Night fans.
Kirkus Reviews (on Destined)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Everett
Jenifer Ruff, 2014
World Castle Publishing
278 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781629891422
Summary
At Everett, perfection has a dark side....
Brooke is a highly-motivated coed at prestigious Everett College. She is determined to graduate number one in her class, get accepted at a top medical school, and become a surgeon. She is brilliant, tenacious, and beautiful. Everything is going according to plan, although she's not sure what to do about Ethan, an attractive guy who would like to be more than just friends.
Her classmates and professors are all captivated by her achievements and her outward appearance, with the exception of one student. Only Jessica, a wealthy socialite and Brooke's complete opposite, senses that Brooke might not be all that she appears. But Jessica has her own problems, fueled by too many prescription pills, energy drinks, and a huge case of snobbery.
She's too busy looking down her nose when she should be watching her back. As the semester progresses, Brooke's carefully laid plans are inadvertently threatened. Her sinister past is revealed, and nothing is off limits when it comes to achieving her goals.
Jenifer Ruff does an excellent job weaving this thriller with deep character development, foreboding and surprising events.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Northampton, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Mount Holyoke College; M.P.H., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Charlotte, North Carolina
Jenifer Ruff is the author of dark psychological suspense novels Everett and Rothaker. For more information and future release dates visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
To begin with this appears just like any US college book about a bunch of students, warts and all. The author is subtle introducing the reader to the character. Brooke the star pupil appears perfect- wants to become a surgeon, has the best body as she is ultra fit teaches exercise classes and is so focused. Can anyone be more perfect?
Then there is Jessica living the charmed life, rich but hating the world and surviving on pills and energy drinks. Ethan is starry eyed with Brooke and only sees this “perfect person.” This is a really good psychological thriller, hints are there that Brooke is not as everyone thinks—Jessica is the only person to realize this, but in hating the world and having her own problems the rest just goes past her. The author has created a dark strange character in Brooke and it is only as you get further into the story that you realize just what she is capable of. A sequel is planned and I will be keen to see how things move forward and will Brooke become the surgeon she so longs to become?
A great psychological thriller and an author to look out for.
Jane Brown - e-thriller.com
Discussion Questions
1. How did Everett fit with your own school experiences?
2. Did any of the characters remind you of people you know?
3. What clues did you pick up on along the way that something was not quite right with one of the characters?
4. What were the themes in this book?
5. Near the end of the book Brooke tells Sarah a story about cars being towed at a party and Sarah says “how did you not know what was happening right under your noses?” and Brooke says “sometimes people just see what they want to see.” How do you think this applies to the book?
6. Do you think Brooke could actually get away with what she did?
7. Did it end the way you expected? What would you like to have happened?
8. What do you think is in store for Brooke?
9. If you could ask the author a question, what would you ask?
10. If this were a movie, who would you cast for the main characters?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein, 1961
Ace Books
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780441788385
Summary
One of the greats in science fiction writing and winner of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
It is 25 years after a space launch from Earth landed on Mars—never to return. Now a second expedition heads out to learn what happened and returns home with the Man From Mars. Valentine Michael Smith is human, born from parents of the original expedition...but raised by Martians.
Confronted by the many oddities of a strange new land, Mike must learn to adapt to Earth—not only its atmosphere, but its language and cultural practices. Aided by nurse Gillian Boardman and reporter Ben Caxton, Mikes eludes World Government agents who may be trying to kill him. He finds refuge in the home of Jubal Harshaw, a well-known doctor, lawyer, and writer. Jubal offers protection and wisdom, standing in as a father to Mike.
Mike is the classic outsider viewing and commenting on society's pervading culture—a culture familiar to the book's readers. With considerable wit and humor, Heinlein portrays a futurist civilization gone awry. Consumerism, gambling, sexuality, alcoholism, and hyper-religiosity represent the new norm for Earthlings. Will Mike be Earth's nemesis...or its savior? (From LitLovers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1907
• Raised—Kansas City, Missouri, USA ,
• Death—May 8, 1988
• Where—Carmel, California, USA
• Education—B.S., U.S. Naval Academy
• Awards—4 Hugo Awards; Science Fiction Writers Grand Master
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers," he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre in his time. He set a standard for scientific and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality.
He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s and was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for decades. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
Heinlein was a notable writer of science fiction short stories and one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Heinlein, however, denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.
Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.
Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974 He won Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for publication years when there were no Hugo Awards. In his fiction Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok" and "waldo," and he popularized the terms "TANSTAAFL" and space marine.
Early years
Heinlein was born to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri. The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had a definite influence on his fiction, especially his later works, as he drew heavily upon his childhood in establishing the setting and cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. He often broke with many of the Bible Belt's values and mores—especially in regard to religion and sexual morality—both in his writing and in his personal life.
Heinlein graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1929 with a B.S degree in naval engineering and served as an officer in the Navy. He was assigned to the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington in 1931, where he worked in radio communications, then in its earlier phases, with the carrier's aircraft. He also served aboard the destroyer USS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant.
In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed a design for a waterbed.
After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but he soon quit, either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.
Heinlein supported himself at several occupations, including real estate sales and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. He became active in Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California movement in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the campaign.
Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but he was unsuccessful. In 1954, he wrote, "many Americans ... were asserting loudly that McCarthy had created a 'reign of terror.' Are you terrified? I am not, and I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy's position."
Author
While not destitute after the campaign—he had a small disability pension from the Navy—Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, "Life-Line", was printed in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. Another story, Misfit, followed in November—and Heinlein was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social" science fiction.
During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania. He also wrote for Boys' Life in 1952.
As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. In addition, he wanted to break into better-paying markets. He published four influential short stories for The Saturday Evening Post, making him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto."
In 1950, the movie Destination Moon, a documentary-like film, won an Academy Award for special effects. Heinlein had invented many of the effects; he had also written both story and scenario and co-written the script. He also embarked on a series of juvenile Sci Fi novels for the Charles Scribner's Sons publishing company that went from 1947 through 1959—at the rate of one book each autumn, in time for Christmas presents to teenagers.
In 1948, Heinlein married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, his third wife, to whom he would remain married until his death forty years later. Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters. She was also the first reader of his manuscripts and was reputed to be a better engineer than Heinlein himself.
Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny. Tramp Royale contains two lengthy apologias for the McCarthy hearings. The Heinleins formed the small "Patrick Henry League" in 1958, and they worked in the 1964 Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign. After seeing a full-page ad demanding a halt to nuclear weapons testing, Heinlein spent the next several weeks writing and publishing works that lambasted "Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense" and urged Americans not to become "soft-headed."
In 1959, after Scribner rejected one of his juvenile novels as too controversial, Heinlein felt released from the constraints of writing novels for children. He began to write a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Later life and death
Beginning in 1970 Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry. The decade began with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years. As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.
While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers, and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.
Asked to appear before a Joint Committee of the U.S. House and Senate in 1983, he testified on his belief that spin-offs from space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. Heinlein's surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.
At that time, he had been putting together the early notes for another World as Myth novel. Several of his other works have been published posthumously.
After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title Grumbles from the Grave.
Heinlein's archive is housed by the Special Collections department of McHenry Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The collection includes manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs and artifacts. A substantial portion of the archive has been digitized and it is available online through the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.
A complete collection of Heinlein's published work, conformed and copy-edited by several Heinlein scholars, including biographer William H. Patterson, was published by the Heinlein Trust as the "Virginia Edition," after his wife. (Adapted from Wikipedi. Retrieved 9/29/2013.)
Book Reviews
[D]isastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism"; he characterized Stranger as "puerile and ludicrous", saying "when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers"
Orville Prescott - New York Times (August 4, 1961)
'[D]isturbing, shocking and entertaining.... It sparkles and crackles and produces goose bumps of apprehension and dissatisfaction with the human race.... The best of his many books. (Back cover, 1968 paperback edition.)
Washington Post
[I]n some ways emblematic of the Sixties... It fit the iconoclastic mood of the time, attacking human folly under several guises, especially in the person or persons of the Establishment: government, the military, organized religion. By many of its readers, too, it was taken to advocate a religion of love, and of incalculable power, which could revolutionize human affairs and bring about an apocalyptic change, presumably for the better.
David N. Samuelson - Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction
[T]he values of the sixties could hardly have found a more congenial expression.
Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin - Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Stranger in a Strange Land:
1. The title of Heinlein's novel is taken from Exodus 2:22 in the Old Testament.
And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Why might Heinlein have used the verse? Is there a larger Biblical relationship to the novel?
2. How does Earth in Heinlein's unspecified future differ from the Earth we know today?
3. Aside from language, what are the cultural differences between life on Mars and life on Earth? What must Mike learn in order to adapt to life among humans, e.g., religion, war, and, sex? What else?
4. What does it mean to be a "water brother"?
5. Mike explains that God is "one who groks," and from there he goes on to reveal the Martian concept of life as "Thou art God." Explain! What does "grok" mean?
6. How is human sexuality portrayed in this book? In what way does Mike's sexual awakening parallel his spiritual growth?
7. What is the fourth dimension—where Mike sends the government agents chasing him?
8. Talk about Mike's psychic powers. How has he come by them? How does Jill eventually learn to use them?
9. Talk about the Fosterites— their religious concepts and practices. What is their interest in Mike?
10. SPOILER ALERT: What do you suppose occurs in the private confrontation between Mike and Digby, after which Digby disappears? Why has the author withheld that information?
11. Follow-up to Question 10: Why does Mike feel that he made the best decision possible under the circumstances?
12. How would you describe the Church of All Worlds? What is its central message? What is its appeal? Why do people who initially reject the message later become devoted followers, including Ben?
13. Mike worries that humanity has become stuck in its own unhappiness and strife. What do you think?
14. Is Heinlein's novel anti-feminist? Or does it offer an empowering message for women?
15. SPOILER ALERT: Why does Mike decide to sacrifice himself at the novel's end?
16. SPOILER ALERT Is this a religious book? Is it anti-religious or blasphemous? Does the story parallel the life of Jesus? Or the archangel Michael?
17. What does this book satirize?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Bleeding Edge
Thomas Pynchon, 2013
Penguin Group USA
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594204234
Summary
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com 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 license 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 mom—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 neighborhood—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 DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling 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? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— May 8, 1937
• Where—Glen Cove, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Awards—National Book Award; William Faulkner
Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist, noted for his dense and complex novels. Both his fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles, and themes, including history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and he is regularly cited by Americans as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Many observers have mentioned Pynchon as a Nobel Prize contender, and renowned critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time—along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy.
Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Family background
Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. (1907–1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909–1996). His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, then became the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1636, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil.
Pynchon's family background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
Early years
Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay, where he was awarded "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper. These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and recurring subject matter he would use throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humor, illicit drug use, and paranoia.
After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, he returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English.
After leaving Cornell, Pynchon was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle, Washinton, where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News, a support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force.
Pynchon's experiences at Boeing inspired his depictions of the "Yoyodyne" corporation in V. and The Crying of Lot 49, and both his background in physics and the technical journalism he undertook at Boeing provided much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow.
After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pynchon began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
Early novels and writings
• V. was published in 1963, winning a William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year. After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent some time in New York and Mexico before moving to California, where he was reportedly based for much of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was during this time he flirted with the lifestyle of the Beat and hippie countercultures. In 1964, his application to the graduate program in mathematics at UCC-Berkeley was rejected.
In 1966, he wrote a first-hand report on the Watts riots in Los Angeles—"A Journey Into the Mind of Watts," published in the New York Times Magazine.
• The Crying of Lot 49
In 1966, a few months after turning down an offer to teach at Bennington College in Vermont, Pychon published his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground mail service known as "The Tristero" or "Trystero," a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama called The Courier's Tragedy, and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters.
Crying Lot proposes a series of seemingly incredible interconnections between these events and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like V., the novel contains a wealth of references to science and technology and obscure historical events. Both books dwell on the detritus of American society and culture. The novel continues Pynchon's strategy of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of popular culture within his prose narratives.
• Gravity's Rainbow
Published in 1973, Pynchon's third novel is his most celebrated. An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work—paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy—the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical material. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel.
The major portion of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in London and Europe in the final months of World War II and the weeks immediately following VE Day. Encyclopedic in scope and often self-conscious in style, the novel displays erudition in psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature, and film.
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, while the Pulitzer board vetoed its own jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and in parts "obscene."
Later novels and writings
A collection of Pynchon's early short stories, Slow Learner, was published in 1984, with a lengthy autobiographical introduction. In October of the same year, his article "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" was published in the New York Times Book Review.
In April 1988, Pynchon contributed an extensive review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera to the New York Times, under the title "The Heart's Eternal Vow."
• Vineland
Pynchon's fourth novel, released in 1990, disappointed a majority of fans and critics. Set in California in the 1960s and 1980s, it describes the relationship between an FBI COINTELPRO agent and a female radical filmmaker. Its strong socio-political undercurrents detail the constant battle between authoritarianism and communalism, and between resistance and complicity—with a Pynchon's typical humor.
• Mason & Dixon
Pynchon's fifth novel was published in 1997. A sprawling postmodernist saga recounting the lives and careers of the English astronomer, Charles Mason, and his partner, the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon—surveyors of the Mason-Dixon line during the birth of the American Republic. The majority of commentators acknowledged it as a welcome return to form.
• Against the Day
Released in 2006, Against the Day weighed in at 1,085 pages with over 100 characters. Composed in part of a series of interwoven popular fiction genres, the novel inspired mixed reactions: "exhaustingly brilliant" or "lengthy and rambling." Its extensive condemnation of capitalism, and loyalty to the 1960s ideals was received with regret by mainstream critics in the US.
• Inherent Vice
Pynchon's seventh novel, pubished in 2009, was described by its publisher as "part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon. Private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog."
• Bleeding Edge
Published in 2013, Pynchon's most recent novel takes place in Manhattan's Silicon Alley during “the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11."
Themes
Along with its emphasis on racism and imperialism, Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with "low culture"—comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture is one of the defining characteristics of his writing.
Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works.
- The Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory and contains parodies of calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. It investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use.
- Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism. It also derives much from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities.
- Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the Age of Reason while also depicting the relationships between actual historical figures and fictional characters
The wildly eccentric characters, frenzied action, frequent digressions, and imposing lengths of Pynchon's novels have led critic James Wood to classify Pynchon's work as "hysterical realism." Other writers whose work has been labeled as hysterical realism include Steve Erickson, Neal Stephenson, and Zadie Smith.
Privacy
Relatively little is known about Thomas Pynchon's private life; he has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than forty years. Only a few photos of him are known to exist, nearly all from his high school and college days, and his whereabouts have often remained undisclosed.
At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony, which he won for Gravity's Rainbow, a double-talking comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey accepted the prize on Pynchon's behalf. Many guests assumed it was actually Pynchon delivering Corey's trademark torrent of rambling, pseudo-scholarly verbiage. Adding to the confusion, a streaker ran through the hall at the end of Corey's address.
A 1976 article in the Soho Weekly News claimed that Pynchon was in fact J. D. Salinger. Pynchon's written response was simple: "Not bad. Keep trying."
Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters, and refuses the spectacle of celebrity and public appearances. Journalists have continued to speculate about why. Book critic Arthur Salm wrote in 2004 that Pynchon...
simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture that if Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.
In the early 1990s, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson—a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg trials prosecutor. The two have a son, Jackson, born in 1991.
The disclosure of Pynchon's 1990s location in New York City, after many years in which he was believed to be dividing his time between Mexico and northern California, led some journalists and photographers to try to track him down. In 1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan.
Angered by this invasion of his privacy, Pynchon called CNN asking that he not be identified in the footage of the street scenes near his home. "Recluse," he told CNN, is "a code word generated by journalists...meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters." "Let me be unambiguous," he said. "I prefer not to be photographed." The next year, a reporter for the UK Sunday Times managed to snap a photo of him walking with his son.
During 2004, Pynchon made two cameo animated appearances on the television series The Simpsons. He wanted to do the show because his son was a big fan. (Adaptd from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/26/2013.)
Book Reviews
Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous...Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn't anomie but delight. Pynchon himself's a good companion, full of real affectation for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real.
Jonathan Lethem - New York Times Book Review
Brilliantly written...a joy to read...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
A book that fights mightily against the landfill by taking all the random pieces of that wastrel-conman era and putting them into a plot that is both ridiculous and far too close to reality to laugh at without a back-draft of dread.
Boston Globe
It's fitting that Pynchon is tackling the near-present, because the real world has all but overtaken his elaborate, far-out fictions. Paranoia, conspiracy, electronic connection, government surveillance—there's nothing like reading a Pynchon novel while new revelations about the NSA are popping up on your cellphone.
Los Angeles Times
The truth is, Pynchon writes like no one else. He somehow injects love and humanity as the antidote to the dehumanization he fears and obsesses about. He convincingly warp-speeds from one setting and characters to another within the same sentence. Even in his hyper-narrative ways, he remains the master of phrasing—cool, hip, explosive narrative fragments overstuffed with meaning...If you're willing to enter this bleeding-edge (def: more advanced and riskier than cutting-edge) novel, figure to come out the back page a different reader, probably better off.
USA Today
Surely now Pynchon must be in line for the Nobel Prize?... 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.
Scotsman (UK)
A pitch-perfect portrait of pre-9/11, pre-social media New York that's both seductive and impossibly innocent.
Vogue
Brilliant and wonderful.... Bleeding Edge chronicles the birth of the now—our terrorism-obsessed, NSA-everywhere, smartphone Panopticon zeitgeist—in the crash of the towers. It connects the dots, the packets, the pixels. We are all part of this story. We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world. Bleeding Edge is a novel about geeks, the Internet, New York and 9/11. It is funny, sad, paranoid and lyrical. It was difficult to put down. I want to read it again.
Slate.com
The book's real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century...As usual, Pynchon doesn't provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.
Wired Magazine
Where Vineland slyly set a story of Orwellian government surveillance in 1984, Bleeding Edge situates a fable of increasingly sentient computers in, naturally, 2001. Of course, the year 2001 means something besides HAL and Dave now.... The plot's dizzying profusion of murder suspects plays like something out of early Raymond Chandler....but no one rivals Pynchon's range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Maxine [Tarnow's] investigations lead her to hashslingrz monomaniac Gabriel Ice; Igor, a Russian mafioso with a conscience; two rap-spouting sidekicks named Misha and Grisha; government agent Windust, a murderer and torturer....and many more. [A]uthentic, deeply connected characters, all heightened by Pynchon's darkly hilarious way with language and located on the "bleeding edge" as the world changed. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Pynchon makes a much-anticipated return, and it's trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes.... [T]here's paranoia aplenty to be had in Pynchon's saute pan, served up in the dark era of the 9/11 attack, the dot-com meltdown and the Patriot Act.... [B]ut Pynchon has long managed to blend his particularly bleak view of latter-day humankind with...true humor in our foibles.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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