Home > Publication and Reception Histories > Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge Continued

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge Continued

A Quick Biography

Publication History: Since Bleeding Edge is a rather recent novel, it's publication history is pretty brief. There's only one edition, in 3 different mediums.

 First Edition Published September 17, 2013 by Penguin Press HC

 Kindle Version available September 17, 2013  Audio Cd Available September 17, 2013

 Paperback will be available August 26, 2014 Reception History:

General Public Reviews: The general public rates Bleeding Edge as a 3.5 out of 5 stars. Of 166 reviews on Amazon the novel received an average of 3.5 out of 5 stars. Bleeding Edge averaged a 3.56 on Goodreads out of 2,708ratings. Here are a few of the reviews:

 

“Although I haven't finished reading this novel just yet, and am reading this along with Gravity's Rainbow simultaneously, I'm pleased with it. Pynchon's books don't scare me so I am planning to purchase all of his novels and read them all at once. I'm so glad I bought Bleeding Edge, the dust-jacket is so trippy, it changes colors in the light, and sort of has this 3-d illusion feel to it which I love.” Five Stars on Amazon, Assumedly read via Hardcover October 5, 2013

“I'm giving it a 5 mostly because of what I think Pynchon's done narratively - and it's epically, deliriously entertaining. He's a scop, like one of those Old English storytellers alternately sitting or standing before a totem of iconic figures, and he's unrolling to us a way to see the Grendel among us. His hero, however, is not of Beowulfian dimensions - in fact he's an ex-wife/mother-she, and not a warrior at all, but a de-licensed PI now sniffing out fraud. And everybody, to some degree, is bleeding fraudulence.” – Five Stars on Amazon, read via Kindle February 22, 2014

“I could not make it past the first CD. Jeannie's character voices were indistinguishable and colorless. This is the first time I've given up on an audio book.” – One Star on Amazon, read via audio book March 5, 2014

“This was my first experience with Thomas Pynchon and I think he writes for his own amusement and the reader be damned. I thought his internal dialogue annoying and exclusive to the reader and ultimately I wondered "what is the point" - the book left me cold. I realize I am in the minority and the world considers him one of the greats but I don't know why.” - Two stars on Amazon, read via Kindle March 9, 2014

Perhaps of notable importance, and irony, on Amazon, 23 of the 30 reviews that gave Bleeding Edge one star and 16 out of 23 that gave it two stars, were read using either an audio CD or Kindle. So Pynchon’s novel that is immersed in new age technology transfers terribly when actually used on new age technology.

Here are a few quotes from editorial reviews:

From Book Forum “Even as its plot grows ever more complex, Bleeding Edge is reliably entertaining as a sort of cracked Zagat’s, with entries ghostwritten by Ben Katchor.”

The New York Review of Books, “ The Crying of September 11” Michael Chabon. This review, however, is a bit of a cross over between a review and literary analysis.

“And a shrug, perhaps, from those who were born to irony like cavefish into darkness, too cool for pity, too young for rue, having always known that the world and books and Thomas Pynchon can never hope to be anything but copies of copies, parodies of parodies of themselves.”

“His broken plots expose the epistemological brokenness of paranoid systems, which are, after all, nothing but attempts, grander but no less doomed to failure than anyone’s, to make sense of a broken world.”

Here is a quote from one independent scholar Albert Rolls.

“ Bleeding Edge, then, is as much an inquiry into the mysteries of contemporary American life as it is into the mysteries of hashlingrz corporate activities” The novel touches on a larger concern of “ the loss of life’s depth, what Pynchon characterizes as the development of ‘ some stupefied consensus about what life has to be