Vineland Reread

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 19 Jan 2021 | Archive Date 19 Mar 2021

Talking about this book? Use #VinelandReread #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a...


Advance Praise

"Vineland Reread is a delight. Peter Coviello tells a sweet and joyous story about how to read and reread a treasured book, about how reading is an act that makes meaning, and about how that meaning anchors our lives. This is the rare work that will please everyone––scholars of Pynchon, readers of Vineland, adoring fans, and hardened skeptics––with gorgeous sentences that sparkle generously as they both describe and perform the best of what criticism is and can be. "

—Jordan Alexander Stein, author of When Novels Were Books

"Vineland Reread is a delight. Peter Coviello tells a sweet and joyous story about how to read and reread a treasured book, about how reading is an act that makes meaning, and about how that meaning...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9780231185219
PRICE $20.00 (USD)

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)

Average rating from 1 member