<nettime> Thomas Pynchon new novel on NYC and the 2001 dotcom bubble

[Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com>]

"Bleeding Edge" will be released on 17th september. I can't wait to read it.

The publisher's blurb:

"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-exhusband 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?"

http://thepenguinpress.com/book/bleeding-edge/


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