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Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
Bleeding Edge
by: (author)
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... show more
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-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her licence 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 mum - 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 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 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, channelling 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?  

źródło opisu: http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/
źródło okładki: http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/9780224099028
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Format: papier
ISBN: 9780224099028
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Pages no: 477
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
The English Student
The English Student rated it
4.0 Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon
I can't pretend that I've even begun to understand it yet, Bleeding Edge being the usual Pynchon mixture of unresolved plot, unconnected images and a sense of some deep significance that's always just eluding you, but a fun, deeply paranoid read about the Internet, New York and Cold War hangovers.
Tellulah Darling
Tellulah Darling rated it
2.0 Oh vey! Such a headache already!
Huh. I thought Bleeding Edge was going to be a slick investigative thriller into virtual reality, terrorism and NYC in the days leading up to 9/11. Which it kind of was except for the fact that it just went on forever. So many twists and turns and new connections that by the end I had a headache and...
Girl Well Read
Girl Well Read rated it
2.0 Bleeding Edge
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. Sigh... There is no question Pynchon is a talented writer. There is also no question that while he is writing circles around his reader he loses them along the way and unfortunately I was one of those readers this time out. The main charac...
Clif's Book World
Clif's Book World rated it
4.0 Bleeding Edge
We didn’t know it at the time, but Dickens’ phrase, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” could be applied to the period of time following the dot-com bust and preceding 9/11. This novel is an exploration of life in New York City about six months prior to 9/11 and then about six mon...
Blogged Out Ma Nut
Blogged Out Ma Nut rated it
3.0
It was ok ☺I won’t say much about the plot- if you’ve read Pynchon before, you’ll know why!While reading this I kept thinking about something [a:Louis Theroux|92848|Louis Theroux|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1273540184p2/92848.jpg] said, which was (I never remember exact quotes) alo...
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