50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers

Why read a 'difficult' book?

Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934)

Emily Temple (Flavorwire) has compiled a list of '50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers'. Their toughness varies from the sheer bulk of the volume (eg. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stein's The Making of Americans), to their stylistic virtuosity (Finnegans Wake, anyone?). But despite their daunting reputations, there can be something special about reading a 'difficult' book.

Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.

There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)

[Read the Full List]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Michael Chabon on Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon's new novel reviewed in the NYRB

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

From Michael Chabon (New York Review of Books):

Irony, verbal and situational, has been the most often remarked of the tactics deployed by Pynchon in his fifty-year struggle against what fellow Nassau County visionary Jack Kirby called “the Anti-Life Equation”: death understood as the dehumanization imposed by vast and totalizing systems of control. And in spite of the depravities, brutalities, and horrors to be found in the pages of V. (1963), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), or Against the Day (2006), Pynchon’s struggle has overarchingly been a joyful one, rooted in a profound and abiding goofiness.

His magic bag has proved to be charged as inexhaustibly as Felix the Cat’s with puns, parodies, bits of shtick and slapstick. Unflinching when faced with stench and corruption, confronting massacres and atrocities in pre–World War I German Southwest Africa, in rocket-blitzed London, in goon-haunted Colorado during the Labor Wars, Pynchon has with hope and abandon sounded his mighty kazoo and flown his freak flag high. He has left the labs, bunkers, prisons, and slave factories of Anti-Life littered with banana peels. He has heaped up mounds of ironic incongruities behind him—corny lyrics, drug jokes, sight gags, characters surnamed Porpentine, Squalidozzi, and Vibe—as he worked his way along, undermining the twentieth century like Bugs Bunny tunneling toward Pismo Beach. Pynchon, irony: big deal.

But not so fast. Dramatic irony, Hammond organ and all, is something new, and unexpected, in Pynchon. Until Bleeding Edge his work has not relied for effect on readers’ foreknowledge of the outcome of some significant or well-known event. In Against the Day the 1902 collapse of St. Mark’s campanile in Venice and the so-called Tunguska event of 1908 are wired to the lives and fates of Pynchon’s characters, but these incidents lie along the frontage road of history’s expressway. Like other factual bits of history in the novels—Wernher von Braun’s SS-symbol-shaped rocket works buried under a Harz mountain, an obscure Civil War naval battle off the coast of California between a Confederate warship and an Imperial Russian flotilla—they tend in their extravagance or absurdity to form a seamless part of the Pynchon ambience. The reader is cheerfully encouraged to confound them with the author’s pure inventions, and generally has no idea how things are going to turn out. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• On the Thomas Pynchon Trail
• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

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

A new title from Bloomsbury

James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo

From Bloomsbury:

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. By examining implicit and explicit allusion to these events in their work, it becomes apparent that both consider 9/11 a crucial event, and that it has profoundly impacted their work. From this important point, the volume focuses on the major change identifiable in both author's work; a change in the perception, and conception, of time. This is not, however, a simple change after 2001. It allows, at the same time, a re-examination of both authors work, and the acknowledgment of time as a crucial concept to both authors throughout their careers. Engaging with several theories of time, and their reiteration and examination in both authors work, this volume contributes both to the understanding of literary time, and to the work of Pynchon and DeLillo. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• On the Thomas Pynchon Trail
• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

On the Thomas Pynchon Trail

Boris Kachka on the life and work of an American writer

Pynchon, age 16 (left), and an artist's rendering of how he may look today (right)

From Boris Kachka (Vulture):

Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery

David Cronenberg's Literary Influences

Cronenberg names Pynchon, Barnes, Kafka and Céline as early influences

David Cronenberg

From New York Magazine:

What did you want to do with your life back then?

I did aspire to be an obscure novelist. I thought you could probably do your best work outside of fame, because you’d be following your integrity. [Like] Kafka, who barely published in his own lifetime. I loved finding people like Djuna Barnes. I figured someone like me would discover me years from then.

What were you writing?

Sci-fi, mostly, but some stuff like Thomas Pynchon. There was that hallucinogenic view of the world, and V. was such a wonderful novel. I read it in the sixties in France, and also Journey to the End of the Night, by Céline, a little later that year. There was a clarity to it, a weird and exuberant cruelty. He was seeing war in the coldest, most revealing light. You would not read that book and think that you wanted to be a soldier. No romanticism. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg on his Life and Work
• David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis, DeLillo and Robert Pattinson
• Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Striking cover art and dust jacket synopsis available from Amazon

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Synopsis from Amazon:

“Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?”

Bleeding Edge will be published on 17 September 2013 [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Illustrations of Gravity's Rainbow

An interview with artist and illustrator Zak Smith

Zak Smith, Image 579, 'State Prosecuter von Wenk... Mabuse trying to hypnotize him'

From The Modern Word:

Erik Ketzan: So you created an illustration for every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. How long did that take?

Zak Smith: It took like 9 months, but I was working on other stuff, too, at the same time. People always go “Wow, you must’ve had a lot of free time on your hands,” but, y’know, it’s my job to. You do something 14 hours a day every day, you can get a lot done. I think people are conditioned by the art they usually see in galleries to think that it takes an artist a full 8 months to—say—glue a dixie cup to a rug and write “Slander!” on it in lipstick—so when they see something where an artist had to actually work as much as a person with a real job does it seems like it must’ve taken forever. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Yuko Kondo's Pynchon Paperbacks
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics
• International Pynchon Week 2013

Yuko Kondo's Pynchon Paperbacks

Artist displays their recent makeover of Vintage's Pynchon catalogue

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland. Design: Yuko Kondo.

Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner. Design: Yuko Kondo.

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. Design: Yuko Kondo.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. Design: Yuko Kondo.

Thomas Pynchon, V. Design: Yuko Kondo.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. Design: Yuko Kondo.

From the official website of designer Yuko Kondo: ‘I made the book covers for a re-issue of seven Thomas Pynchon novels published by Vintage. / The brief was to choose random words from inside each novel and to draw these words.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

New novel to be set between dotcom boom collapse and September 11th

Tribeca, Manhattan

From Alison Flood (The Guardian): 'Bleeding Edge, which will be published in America on 17 September this year, will be set in 2001 "in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11", said Pynchon's American publisher Penguin in its 2012 results announcement yesterday. The new novel follows 2009's LA-set private eye tale Inherent Vice, which takes place in the late 60s and is set to be adapted for film by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Joaquin Phoenix.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality
• Writers: Don DeLillo

Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics

3:AM Magazine publishes an essay by Martin Paul Eve

From Martin Paul Eve (3:AM Magazine):

Thomas Pynchon ranks among the most critically acclaimed American authors of the past fifty years; certainly so when viewed in terms of academic scholarship. He has two academic journals devoted solely to his work and influence (Pynchon Notes and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon), over twenty monographs exploring his writing and, since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom alone on, or in major part concerning, his fiction. This trend shows no sign of stopping; with apologies to the well-known formulation of James Joyce, almost a century ago, it seems as though Thomas Pynchon will continue to keep the professors busy.

The reasons for this critical proliferation are not hard to fathom. Pynchon is a man of mystery, refusing to be photographed or interviewed, who has published some of the finest works of post-war literature, particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. His novels have most frequently been type-cast as exemplary of the postmodern – saturated as they are with paranoia, indeterminacy and failed quest-narratives – but this seriously underplays the scale of Pynchon’s writing. Consider that Pynchon is also a writer of enormous historical scope. V. spans the defining moments of crisis in the twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow re-casts the sixties in terms of World War II and the history of Calvinism (including a flashback to a Mauritian Dodo hunt) while Mason & Dixon explores the interrelation of its eponymous protagonists with the Age of Reason and slavery in America. If this weren’t enough, his novels are interdisciplinary, incorporating metaphors from science and technology, cartography, popular culture, cartoons, aural puns, mathematical in-jokes, outrageous character names (and sexual practices) and sublime prose poetry.

More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War. How many of us notice, inscribed upon our antibiotics, the second label, permanently hidden beneath the surface-level, reading “sulfonamide” and “I.G. Farben”? How many of us see, when we watch satellite television, the German technician crying: “Vergeltungswaffe”? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon: Signed Books
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Thomas Pynchon: Signed Books

A 2011 auction of Pynchon's works, with personalised inscriptions

From a 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times:

Thomas Pynchon has surfaced in a remarkable book collection and the memories of his lifelong friend Phyllis Gebauer, who shared stories of one of America's most reclusive writers Wednesday night in Los Angeles.

The only known collection of signed first editions of Pynchon's works, a gift to the UCLA Extension Writers Program, debuted at an invitation-only event in Westwood. Although the exceedingly private author does not hold public book signings, he sent inscribed copies of each of his books as they were published to Phyllis and Fred Gebauer. The writer and the couple became friends in the early 1960s.

Most of Pynchon's inscriptions include personal comments. In "The Crying of Lot 49," Pynchon wrote, "For Fred and Phyllis, who saw this first, though we're still friends anyway. -- Tom." One, in "Gravity's Rainbow," includes an illustration of a smiling pig, harking back to a piñata the Gebauers brought him as a gift when they were all living in Southern California. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

International Pynchon Week 2013

5-8 August 2013 · Durham University

Design: Lorna Urwin

International Pynchon Week 2013
Lines, Legacies, Anniversaries

2013 marks three significant anniversaries for readers and scholars of Thomas Pynchon: 50 years since the publication of his first novel, V., 40 since his most acclaimed work, Gravity’s Rainbow, and 250 years since the arrival of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon on American shores (the start of the surveying project that would divide a nation and, of course, the subject of Pynchon’s metahistorical novel, Mason & Dixon). In light of this, International Pynchon Week 2013 will be held at Durham University in the UK from the 5th to the 8th of August. The location of the conference has a special resonance as Jeremiah Dixon was born and buried in County Durham.

Given the timing and setting of IPW 2013, we would particularly welcome papers that address the legacies of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow and / or Pynchon’s engagement with the life of Jeremiah Dixon and the North East of England.

Other topics for consideration might include, but are no means limited to:

• Pynchon’s literary heritage / Pynchon’s influence and influences / Pynchon and canonicity
• Novel theoretical approaches
• Biographical criticism
• Trans-Atlantic / Trans-Pacific / Pan-American connections
• Pynchon and History
• Political implications of Pynchon’s work
• Pynchon and borders / boundaries / frontiers / nationhood (esp. Englishness)
• Gender and sexuality in Pynchon
• Pynchon’s publishing process
• Archival research and Pynchon’s source materials
• Pynchon’s music and songs
• The shape and/or phases of Pynchon’s career and its evolving contexts
• The Pynchon scholarly community itself, including online developments (e.g. P-Wiki, PYNCHON-L)

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to samuel.thomas@durham.ac.uk by 20 December 2012. Speakers will be notified by the 1st February 2013. Selected proceedings will be published in a special issue of the new, open access journal Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

A new Thomas Pynchon novel?

Penguin Press announces publication of The Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon

Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times blog Arts Beat has reported the following: 'The secretive novelist Thomas Pynchon is back. He will publish a new book, titled “The Bleeding Edge,” his long-time publisher, Penguin Press, said on Friday. No publication date has been set.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Acclaimed writer and director to adapt Pynchon's recent novel

Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson, known for films such as There Will Be Blood and The Master, is adapting Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Damon Wise (Empire) caught up with Anderson back in September:

Empire's Damon Wise is currently at the Venice Film Festival, and it's there that he spoke to Paul Thomas Anderson about his latest film, The Master, as well as his next project, Inherent Vice.

Based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, it's a 1970s Californian detective story that sees a stoner private eye called Larry "Doc" Sportello helping a former lover with an intriguing and ever-so-complicated, shaggy-dog-story of a case involving infidelity, mental institutions and policemen called "Bigfoot".

Anderson describes it as being "like a Cheech and Chong movie. [Adapting Pychon's work is] just gonna be great and, hopefully, fun."

But although Anderson has been working on bringing the Gravity Rainbow [sic.] author's most accessible work to the big screen for several years, it's not clear exactly when it will happen: “Hopefully not long. I'd like to have a few years of being more productive. But we'll see.”

As for the difficulty in adapting the reclusive writer's novel, Anderson admits it's not going to be easy. “There's so much. But it's fun too, be because they're his words, and... it's like taking your dad's car for a ride, y'know?” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality
• The Master: Official Trailer (2012) [HD]
• There Will Be Blood

Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

A 2009 book trailer from Penguin

A 2009 commercial for Thomas Pynchon's novel, Inherent Vice, narrated by the author himself [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Mark Kermode on Unfilmable Novels

A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mark Kermode's Top 5 David Cronenberg films
• Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson

Tom McCarthy on Friedrich Kittler

The aura that surrounds the ‘Derrida of the digital age’

Friedrich Kittler

Tom McCarthy writes on the aura of Friedrich Kittler in the London Review of Books blog: 'In 2004, after I gave an artist’s talk in a gallery in Berlin, a group of people strode up to speak to me. They were, they told me, followers of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, members of his entourage – or, to give it its semi-official name, the Kittlerjugend. They used this last term not without irony; but it was the type of irony that masks seriousness, in the way that Hamlet’s pretending to be mad acts as a cover for him actually being mad. The shoulders of the lead delegate, a charismatic Russian émigrée named Joulia Strauss, were wrapped in a hand-woven silk shawl bearing a large reproduction of al-Jazeera’s test pattern. My art project, they informed me (it involved a narrative of radio transmission and network infiltration), met with their approval – that is, with the approval of the man himself, or at least (and perhaps equally importantly) of his aura.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Contemporary media theorist and literary critic passes away, aged 68

Friedrich Kittler

Report from media blog, Machinology (thanks to Volker Frick for the link): 'Writing anything after hearing about the death of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) is not really easy, even if it surely will boost the academic publishing industry into a range of publications. Somewhere I read him characterized as the “Derrida of media theory” and where the writer (probablyWinthrop-Young or Peters) added that of course, Kittler would like to be called “Foucault of media theory”.' [Read More]

Will Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Odds are he just might

Cormac McCarthy

The next Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded until October this year, but already speculation is beginning to grow. Various betting agencies are moving in on the discussion, with UK agency nicerodds.co.uk even going so far as to compile a list of odds. The current favourite is American writer Cormac McCarthy, known for novels such as The Road and No Country for Old Men (link via Susan Tomaselli):

According to online UK betting agency nicerodds.co.uk, Cormac McCarthy is again the favorite to take out the lucrative prize. The agency is offering odds of 8 to 1 for McCarthy. The second favorite is Japan’s Haruki Murakami (9 to 1) with Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker Assia Djebar currently listed in third place (10 to 1).

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 Top 10 Favorites
Cormac McCarthy – 8 to 1
Haruki Murakami – 9 to 1
Assia Djebar – 10 to 1
Don Delillo – 13 to 1
Ko Un – 15 to 1
Amos Oz – 15 to 1
Philip Roth – 15 to 1
Adonis – 17 to 1
Joyce Carol Oates – 17 to 1
Thomas Pynchon – 17 to 1

Source: Suite 101

Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery

Online comic strip portrays reclusive American writer

The wonderful literary blog Biblioklept has drawn my attention to a comic strip by Kelly Shane and Woody Compton, based on the life of reclusive postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon. Conceived as part of a series entitled Is This Tomorrow?, the piece portray's the writer in several guises, and recounts brief anecdotes from his life.

Source: 'Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery', Is This Tomorrow?