For over 60 years, Thomas Pynchon has been one of the most elusive, innovative, confounding, critically acclaimed figures in literature – and his new novel follows a Milwaukee private detective searching for the heiress to a cheese empire.
On Wednesday, Pynchon’s publisher, Penguin Random House, announced the upcoming release of the new novel, Shadow Ticket, on October 7. It will be Pynchon’s first novel since 2013’s Bleeding Edge.
The publisher’s description reads:
“Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering.”
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The case leads McTaggart out of Wisconsin and around the world in search of the cheese heiress.
“Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”
Pynchon is likely best known for his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a seminal postmodern World War II novel considered one of the boldest ever written. Literary scholar Tony Tanner called it “both one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses.”
He also voiced himself twice on “The Simpsons.”
The 87-year-old author is well known for avoiding publicity. So much so that the most recent confirmed photos of him are from the 1950s.
Shadow Ticket is available for preorder now.
