Inherent Vice

There are some contemporary writers who once I get a taste for them...I have to read everything they write. And that some of these writers have been alive and publishing adds the excitement of when they release a new work!!! These writers of course include GOD: William Burroughs (R.I.P. sweet prince), and then in no particular order...Paul Auster, Kathy Acker, Chuck Palaniuk, John Fowles, Irvine Welsh, John D. MacDonald (R.I.P.), John Irving, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison ....and...

....the Thomas Pynchon.

These writers always seem to know something. To know something I need to know, need to learn or already know. They seem to know something that no one else talks about. You don't usually learn it from schools, from family, from society. These writers know about life. And how to live. How to do the right thing.

It doesn't matter if I've been broke, I will sit in a bookstore and read their work whenever it has been freshly published. It is like feeling you are part of something...so close to a fellow citizen...like a friend, like a kindred spirit. These are writers who I will get the hardcover. It will be read asap.


A terrific book trailer of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, a detective story, called Inherent Vice. The title comes from The term 'inherent vice' is a legal tenet referring to a "hidden defect (or the very nature) of a good or property which of itself is the cause of (or contributes to) its deterioration, damage, or wastage. Such characteristics or defects make the item an unacceptable risk to a carrier or insurer. If the characteristic or defect is not visible, and if the carrier or the insurer has not been warned of it, neither of them may be liable for any claim arising solely out of the inherent vice."

The novel has been reviewed as been called psychedelic noir (by Alan Cabal at High Times Magazine)

WIRED Magazine has an unofficial map of Thomas Pynchon's Los Angeles from Inherent Vice. WIREDsays...Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic '60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. (The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.) And if you map the novel against Pynchon's life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.

Related Links:

1) You can read the first chapter...here
2) Review in The New Yorker
3) NYT's review