FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Thomas Pynchon Is Going Digital

Will you read Gravity's Rainbow now that it's an e-book? Probably not.

For all the bombed out, drug-addled techno-anxieties that scream across the works of American novelist Thomas Pynchon, news of the reclusive author’s e-book foray is, at first glance, the equivalent of a 20-megaton V-2 rocket blast. But, sure enough. Thomas Pynchon is going digital.

The full Pynchon catalog—a collection of short stories and seven novels—is now available for download through Penguin Press. “It wasn’t exactly the elephant in the drawing room,” Ann Godoff, Penguin’s president and editor-in-chief, told The New York Times. “But we felt that the moment was right.” Godoff added that there has been a year's long push to digitize the challenging, paranoid, characteristically dense and dark comedies of Pynchon, who’s best known for penning 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, that sprawling anti-war yarn you’ve been telling every potential love interest since university that you just pored over and found “really, really profound,” even though after seven unsuccessful passes the tome just sits there atop your IKEA Expedit. Admit it.

But hey, the old man seems to have come around. Not to say Pynchon, for one, fully welcomes our new Tablet Overlords, but rather he’s likely just warmed up to the idea of expanding his audience: “I think he wants to have more readers,” Godoff said. “He didn’t want to not be a part of that.”

Read the rest over at Motherboard.