Bleeding Edge Featured Articles

Featured Articles

Jonathan Lethem's review of Bleeding Edge for The New York Times, may be the most intelligent and insightful review of them all. Lethem gets it! "[There is] the sheer vitality and fascination, the plummets into beauty and horror, the unique flashes of galactic epiphany, in Pynchon’s method. 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 affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. He spoils us with descriptive flights." Read the review...

Noticing that New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has panned every Pynchon novel after Mason & Dixon (1997) — the latest target being Bleeding Edge — I became curious as to just who this grumpy critic is. If you're curious too, read "Assessing Michiko Kakutani":

"Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home." Read on...

Bleeding Edge Review by David Kipen, for Publishers Weekly, is a well written and insightful appreciation of Pynchon's craft and his new novel! "No one, but no one, rivals Pynchon's range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency." Read the review...