Crying of Lot 49: A Novel

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

“The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—New York Times

Thomas Pynchon’s highly original, postmodernist classic, a satire of American life about a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a seeming international conspiracy.

When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the U...