One of these years...

One of these years we'll leave the families stateside and journey together to check out International Pynchon Week. This year it'll be held in June in the French Atlantic coastal city of La Rochelle.

Sounds Pynchonian: (from their website) "The conveners hope this liminal space on the margins of Europe will inspire Pynchon scholars to sail out towards yet unexplored territories, following some of the leads below or picking up any related or unrelated Pynchonian line."

It looks like (every year) they have some interesting talks and lectures and discussions. I'm curious how well-attended it will be.

Intriguing Article Title

I get a print edition of LA Times' Sunday paper delivered each week. The thick Sports section is surprisingly light on reading content, while the thin (and possibly my favorite section) Arts & Books section is regularly relatively dense. Yesterday, my birthday of all days, the following title caught my attention:

Say what?

I read through the entire article and am inspired to eventually pick up the novel in question, A Little More Human by Fiona Maazel.

Ms. Maazel's website is neat ("Rhymes with Gazelle" is the sub-title) and has a link to the article above. The story is out-there in the sense that we're interested in, but really this is the first time I've found an article written about a woman writer being compared to Pynchon.

Of course there are wild, digressive, blitz-krieg lady writers either inspired by or similar to our man Pynchon, but I haven't been notified of any. Is that weird or a sign of the times? Maybe not everybody aspires to write spiraling and borderline dissolved narratives...

Anyway, the final sentence of Jim Ruland's review sums up bot the work in question and a Pynchon novel pretty well:

"A Little More Human is a character-driven work of literary fiction

that also happens to be a thriller guided by a web of intrigue with 

an ending that not even a mind reader could see coming.              "