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11/10/08

New Edition Of SLU Prof's Guide To Thomas Pynchon Novel Published

CANTON - A new edition of the 1994 book A Companion Guide to 'The Crying of Lot 49,' by St. Lawrence University Professor of English J. Kerr Grant, has been published by the University of Georgia Press.

The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's most accessible work and perhaps the one most widely read and taught. Nonetheless, the novel poses many challenges, with its impressive range of references to contemporary popular and material culture; history and geography; and slang and technical jargon. This expanded and updated companion to the novel contains more than 500 notes keyed to the 2006 Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, the 1986 Harper Perennial Library edition and the 1967 Bantam edition. The majority of notes are interpretive, although some are designed to provide a historical context or to recover the meaning of a reference that, over time, has proved ephemeral. This new edition adds quotations and paraphrases drawn from criticism published since 1994, thus adding more than 70 new entries to the list of works cited. More than 50 annotations have been added and some 80 annotations have been expanded.

Grant has been a member of the St. Lawrence faculty since 1977; he is a graduate of Cambridge University, with a master's degree from the University of East Anglia and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Grant also wrote A Companion to 'V,' published by the University of Georgia Press. It is a guide to reading Pynchon's novel V.

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