Slow Learner

More about the book

Long before Thomas Pynchon published his famous novel V. and radically changed the shape of literature in our century, he was writing stories—inventive, wonderfully imagined short fiction that startled and delighted readers fortunate enough to find them among the pages of Kenyon Review or The Noble Savage. Now, for the first time, five of these stories have been collected in book form, as Slow Learner. "The Small Rain," "Low-Lands," "Entropy," "Under the Small Rain," and The Secret Integration," all written between 1958 and 1964, appear here together with Pynchon's own very candid and surprisingly personal introduction. In it Pynchon reveals how he came to write each work and how he now views the young author he was then, making this volume more than a collection of stories, but a rare and fascinating self-portrait of an intensely private man.