Slogging through the science and history, sex and paranoia that crowd Thomas Pynchon's cartoonish new novel, it's obvious his disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does.
"The Intuitionist" author Colson Whitehead talks about elevator codebooks, too many "Good Times" jokes and the lost legacy of the black intellectual novel
David Bowman reviews "Cloudsplitter," Russell Banks' effort at the Great American Novel, an ambitious resurrection of the life and times of anti-slavery crusader John Brown.
The fall of the house of Pynchon
The Fix