{"product_id":"vineland-reread-9780231185219","title":"Vineland Reread","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eVineland\u003c\/i\u003e is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon's return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic \u003ci\u003eGravity's Rainbow\u003c\/i\u003e, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked \u003ci\u003eVineland\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBeginning with his early besotted encounters with \u003ci\u003eVineland\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eVineland\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books include \u003ci\u003eLong Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs\u003c\/i\u003e (2018) and \u003ci\u003eMake Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism\u003c\/i\u003e (2019).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51860211040530,"sku":"9780231185219","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_e813af05-d70c-4b98-970e-6c8973b1c5c2.jpg?v=1767779356","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/vineland-reread-9780231185219","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}