Thomas Pynchon: Travel Writer?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.24.06 | 6:59 AM ET
“Against the Day,” the first Thomas Pynchon book since Mason & Dixon in 1997, will be released in December, according to the AP and other press reports. It’s a novel, but from a description allegedly written by Pynchon himself that appears on Amazon.com, it sounds like it could be a hell of a travel book. From the promo blurb: “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.” And he covers all that ground in a mere 992 pages.
Pynchon’s fiction spans the world—“Mason and Dixon” follows the path of the 18th century British surveyors and explorers—but you will not see the notoriously reclusive author on a book tour. Said Penguin publicist Tracy Locke to the AP: “That will not be happening, no.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
