Mason & Dixon

$5.99 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Press
On sale Jun 13, 2012 | 9781101594643
Sales rights: World

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation

Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse.

Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.

Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." —John Leonard, The Nation

"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement . . . the novel of our time." Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Awash with light and charm, rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with the minutiae of another time and world, Mason & Dixon is less a book to read through than to read in, to savor paragraph by paragraph." —Paul Skenazy, San Francisco Chronicle

"As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. This almost feels like the last great fiction of our dying era. Though I'm sure it won't be, I must admire its sense of the bright farewell, the clear passing overseas of the torch that Peacock, Dickens, Lawrence, and Conrad bore. You'll not find a better, this next time around." —John Fowles, The Spectator

"A dazzling work of imaginative re-creation, a marvel-filled historical novel . . . Exceptionally funny." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"Mason & Dixon will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because nowhere else but America would you find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon." —Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek

"Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." —Harold Bloom, Bostonia

"This is old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe V., and Gravity's Rainbow." —T. Coraghessan Boyle, The New York Times Book Review

"A unique and miraculous experience . . . A tale of scientific triumph and epic loss." —Paul Gray, Time

"This is a book of a lifetime." —Frank MacConnell, Commonweal

"It is a sad and beautiful and nutty and profound book . . . All I can do is doff my cap." —Lucy Sante, New York

"An astonishing and wonderful book." —Louis Menand, The New York Times Review of Books

"Very grand and mad and beautiful . . . I can't remember ever having reviewed a more original novel . . . If America produces a novel to come near this marvelous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it." —Philip Hensher, Spectator

"A masterpiece." —Ted Mooney, Los Angeles Times

"A contemporary Don Quixote or Canterbury Tales - or more accurately the Iliad and Odyssey, with heavy splashes of Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers. Pynchon's not only back, but he's left us all in the dust again, with only the sound of his laughter echoing far in front of us." —Jim Knipfel, New York Press

"With Mason & Dixon, we're again in the generous hands of one of American literature's true masters." —Rick Moody, The Atlantic Monthly

About

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation

Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse.

Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.

Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.

Praise

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." —John Leonard, The Nation

"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement . . . the novel of our time." Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Awash with light and charm, rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with the minutiae of another time and world, Mason & Dixon is less a book to read through than to read in, to savor paragraph by paragraph." —Paul Skenazy, San Francisco Chronicle

"As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. This almost feels like the last great fiction of our dying era. Though I'm sure it won't be, I must admire its sense of the bright farewell, the clear passing overseas of the torch that Peacock, Dickens, Lawrence, and Conrad bore. You'll not find a better, this next time around." —John Fowles, The Spectator

"A dazzling work of imaginative re-creation, a marvel-filled historical novel . . . Exceptionally funny." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"Mason & Dixon will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because nowhere else but America would you find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon." —Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek

"Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." —Harold Bloom, Bostonia

"This is old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe V., and Gravity's Rainbow." —T. Coraghessan Boyle, The New York Times Book Review

"A unique and miraculous experience . . . A tale of scientific triumph and epic loss." —Paul Gray, Time

"This is a book of a lifetime." —Frank MacConnell, Commonweal

"It is a sad and beautiful and nutty and profound book . . . All I can do is doff my cap." —Lucy Sante, New York

"An astonishing and wonderful book." —Louis Menand, The New York Times Review of Books

"Very grand and mad and beautiful . . . I can't remember ever having reviewed a more original novel . . . If America produces a novel to come near this marvelous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it." —Philip Hensher, Spectator

"A masterpiece." —Ted Mooney, Los Angeles Times

"A contemporary Don Quixote or Canterbury Tales - or more accurately the Iliad and Odyssey, with heavy splashes of Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers. Pynchon's not only back, but he's left us all in the dust again, with only the sound of his laughter echoing far in front of us." —Jim Knipfel, New York Press

"With Mason & Dixon, we're again in the generous hands of one of American literature's true masters." —Rick Moody, The Atlantic Monthly