Bleeding Edge

Author: Thomas Pynchon

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 32.95 AUD
  • : 9780224099103
  • : Random House
  • : Jonathan Cape
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  • : June 2013
  • : 234mm X 153mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 32.95
  • : September 2013
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Thomas Pynchon
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  • : Paperback
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  • : very good
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  • : 496
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Barcode 9780224099103
9780224099103

Description

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom 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-scalre con artist. She used to be legally certified but her licence got pulled a while back, which as 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 peoples' bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom - two boys in elementary schoo, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighbourhood - 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 suway 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?

Author description

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V. The Crying Of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day and, most recently, Inherent Vice. . He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.