Thomas Pynchon has 8 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 47 ratings. The most-rated is Gravity's Rainbow.
Gravity's Rainbow
Summary
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
©1973 Thomas Pynchon (P)2014 Penguin Audio
The Crying of Lot 49
Summary
Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy. Calling Thomas Pynchon a "virtuoso with prose", the Chicago Tribune compares his work to James Joyce's Ulysses. Pynchon, winner of the National Book Award, has shocked, enthralled, and delighted fans for more than 40 years with his satire and wit.
©1965, 1966 Thomas Pynchon (P)2005 Recorded Books
Inherent Vice
Summary
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon. Private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. It's been awhile since Doc has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy", except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite that, he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists....
©2009 Thomas Pynchon (P)2009 Penguin Audio
Against the Day
Summary
"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. "As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. "Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. "Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck." —Thomas Pynchon
©2006 Thomas Pynchon (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
Mason & Dixon
Summary
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 re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
©1997 Thomas Pynchon (P)2019 Recorded Books
Vineland
Summary
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in Northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter, Prairie, search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a '60s radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sports car scene in V.).
©1990 Thomas Pynchon (P)2018 Recorded Books
Bleeding Edge
Summary
Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the Internet. It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left. Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?
©2013 Thomas Pynchon (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Die Enden der Parabel
Summary
Das Leben als Parabel. Parabelförmig ist die Flugbahn zwischen zwei Punkten, ist die Flugbahn der deutschen V-Waffen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, deren Entwicklung und Einsatz nur einen der zahllosen Handlungsstränge dieses Pandämoniums darstellen. Eine der Hauptfiguren ist der GI Tyrone Slothorp, der eine Erektion bekommt, bevor eine V2-Rakete einschlägt. Als lebendiges Frühwarnsystem ist er nicht nur für die Alliierten interessant. Der britische Officer Pirate Prentice und die holländische Doppelagentin Katje suchen mit Slothorp in einer wilden Verfolgungsjagd nach dem Geheimnis seiner Konditionierung. Sie reisen durch ein vom Krieg zerstörtes Deutschland in dem Anarchie und Paranoia herrschen. Thomas Pynchons großer Roman ist bereits zu einem Mythos der modernen Literatur geworden. Bearbeitet und inszeniert vom ausgezeichneten Hörspiel-Regisseur Klaus Buhlert ist ein wahres akustisches Kunstwerk entstanden. Prominente Sprecher wie Bibiana Beglau, Felix Goeser, Franz Pätzold, Corinna Harfouch, Wolfram Koch, Jens Harzer oder Manfred Zapatka zählen zum knapp 40-köpfigen Ensemble. In deiner Audible-Bibliothek findest du für dieses Hörerlebnis eine PDF-Datei mit zusätzlichem Material.
©1989 Rowohlt Verlag GmbH. Übersetzung von Elfriede Jelinek und Thomas Piltz (P)2020 Hörbuch Hamburg HHV GmbH