Read the First Page of Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel, Bleeding Edge

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Pyn­chon. What to say? An all-night marathon read­ing of Gravity’s Rain­bow changed my brain chem­istry. A cou­ple days locked in a room with V altered my real­i­ty for­ev­er. I read the first chap­ter of Mason & Dixon. Bought and for­got a copy of Against the Day. Scanned a review of Inher­ent Vice.

So maybe the lat­er Pyn­chon hasn’t grabbed me, or my leisure read­ing time has just evap­o­rat­ed. Or both. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But now we’ve got anoth­er chance to gape at the reclu­sive paranoiac’s labyrinthine prose, since his new nov­el Bleed­ing Edge comes out Sep­tem­ber 17th. And pub­lish­er Pen­guin has thrown us a morsel—you can read the first page of Bleed­ing Edge (above), from Penguin’s Fall 2013 cat­a­log.

Described as a “his­tor­i­cal romance on New York in the ear­ly days of the inter­net,” Bleed­ing Edge takes place in a pre-lapser­ian 2001, “in the lull between the col­lapse of the dot-com boom and the ter­ri­ble events of Sep­tem­ber 11th.” The nov­el promis­es plen­ty of intrigue, dark humor, lay­ers of occult fore­bod­ing, “lamen­ta­tions about the ’60s coun­ter­cul­ture,” and “shady fascis­tic orga­ni­za­tions with futur­is­tic names.”

Read the full descrip­tion of Bleed­ing Edge at Gothamist.

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness