Book cover of Against the Day

Book description

"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." -The New York Times Book Review

"Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant." -USA Today

"Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling." -The Boston Globe

The inimitable Thomas Pynchon has done it again. Hailed as "a major work of art" by The Wall Street Journal, his…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Against the Day as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Pynchon’s Against the Day stages a form of pantheism in which everything bears some form of consciousness, which, like nature, has no border. Cyprian considers that “the earth [might be] alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness”; and it is “as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice.” Pynchon’s characters live in a pantheistic universe in which everything is part of nature and alive—where the wind tries to wake them and the world has a consciousness. Pynchon updates Melville in Mardi, in which, e.g., a character asks, “Think you there is no sensation in being a tree?…

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On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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