Slow Learner

Thomas Pynchon's literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, "V., " but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here. In his introduction to "Slow Learner" the author reviews his early work with disarming candor and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written. "Time" magazine described this introductory essay as "Pynchon's first public gesture toward autobiography."

• V. (Perennial Classics)
• Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
• Inherent Vice: A Novel
• Mason & Dixon: A Novel
• Bleeding Edge: A Novel
• Against the Day
• Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
• The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library)
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, 2nd Edition