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  • Published: 4 August 2022
  • ISBN: 9780099533313
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $28.00

V.




The first novel by the incomparable Thomas Pynchon.

Who, where or what is V.?

Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists known as the ‘Whole Sick Crew’, all while Herbert Stencil looks to find the woman described in his father’s diary: ‘V.’

Sweeping through sixty years, meandering across the globe and brimming with madcap characters, V. is the bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious modern classic that introduced the world to the one-of-a-kind brilliance of Thomas Pynchon.

'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian

'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker
  • Published: 4 August 2022
  • ISBN: 9780099533313
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Also by Thomas Pynchon

See all

Praise for V.

A remarkable book

Sunday Telegraph

Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other

Books and Bookmen

The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one

Time

Mr Pynchon writes with enormous skill and virtuosity

Times Literary Supplement.

[Pynchon] writes richer comedy than most card-carrying comic novelists, filling his eight novels with hilarious spoofs, outlandish characters, screwball dialogue and zany scenarios

Guardian

To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover

New Yorker

[Pynchon's] ambitions in V. are prodigious, enough to demand comparison less with Perelman than with the Joyce of the Circe episode of Ulysses

New York Review of Books 1963

The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation

Ian Rankin, Guardian

A remarkable book

Sunday Telegraph

Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other

Books and Bookmen

The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one

Time

Mr Pynchton writes with enormous skill and virtuosity

Times Literary Supplement.