Pynchon

Pieces look at the works of Joan Didion, Lana Del Rey, and Thomas Pynchon, among others.

A main critical line on Thomas Pynchon's overall attitude toward television is best exemplified by the approach taken in Kathleen Fitzpatrick's The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, which focuses on the ways in which Pynchon's novels endeavor to close themselves off and distance themselves from the televisual in order to shore up the distinction between popular and high art media.

However, as in most Pynchon criticism, their analysis shifts the focus away from sexuality and instead foregrounds countercultural politics, narrative innovation, and individual liberties.

Alfredo Vea's The Mexican Flyboy is one of the most notable novels of the recent era, a book with the combined appeal of Roberto Bolano, Rudolfo Anaya, and Thomas Pynchon.--RC Davis-Undiano, Executive Director

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

INHERENT VICE is a crime-comedy-drama from the visionary Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon. Rambling, psychedelic, and dizzying, Phoenix leads an all-star cast including Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin and Owen Wilson.

Reif Larsen waits 200 pages before betraying his literary lineage by using the phrase "gravity's rainbow." For in his sprawling, pyrotechnic second novel, I Am Radar, one is never far from Pynchon's masterpiece, that once-groundbreaking combination of adolescent hilarity and theoretical physics.

For Bridges, the big challenge was twofold: to stay faithful to Thomas Pynchon's novel, and to fulfill the vision of director Paul Thomas Anderson.

A stylishly complex and at times frustratingly labyrinthine neo-noir thriller set in the '70s, this bold adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel features a nicely shambling performance by Joaquin Phoenix as beach bum detective Larry 'Doc' Sportello.

Anderson's smaller films, Hard Eight (1996) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), pondered more marginal if equally echt-American types, and his latest movie, Inherent Vice, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Thomas Pynchon's hippie private eye Doc Sportello, falls into this category.