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{TEXTBOOK} Slow Learner: Early Stories Ebook Free Download SLOW LEARNER: EARLY STORIES PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Thomas Pynchon | 208 pages | 03 Jan 1998 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099532514 | English | London, United Kingdom Slow Learner () Kurt Vonnegut. Come Along with Me. Shirley Jackson. Exile and the Kingdom. Albert Camus. Last Night. James Salter. Lorrie Moore. Music for Wartime. Rebecca Makkai. Carried Away. After Rain. William Trevor. Key West Tales. Sam the Cat. Matthew Klam. The Rachel Papers. To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf. Olinger Stories. The Complete Stories. Truman Capote. Quartet in Autumn. Selected Stories. The Summer Before the Dark. Doris Lessing. Travels with My Aunt. Graham Greene. The New York Stories. The Fourth Hand. Friend of My Youth. The Safety of Objects. View all 3 comments. I recently felt motivated to actually read this thing cover to cover. It sort of confirmed my opinion that Pynchon's ideal format is the novel. While they aren't poorly written, these stories will probably disappoint anyone who has read one of his more epic novels. Most of the endings seem abrupt, and Pynchon has always seemed like an elaborate architect when it comes to storytelling, so I often felt like the pace was too fast and the length insufficient. His rather self-deprecatory introduction I recently felt motivated to actually read this thing cover to cover. His rather self-deprecatory introduction on the other hand, is priceless. Which makes me feel alright about treating these stories harshly. In it, Pynchon goes on about how failed most of these stories seem in retrospect. He speaks of mistakes such as starting a story with an over-arching concept or theoretical idea in mind i. Entropy , and forcing the plot and characters to adhere to it like fictional slaves. Also mentioned is his case of poor ear for dialogue, which I've always noticed. The more disconcerting thing to read about is the artistic debt that he seems to feel for most beat literature, which I can see to an extent, it's just that I think he is probably the last writer that should give that movement too much credit. This is basically V. Themes of racism, imperialism, paranoia, left vs. Many passages are laugh-out-loud funny, which is Pynchon's most charming constant as a writer. Oddly enough, I enjoyed the Secret Integration the most; a story about a precocious twelve year old, who basically reads like a merry prankster with a degree from MIT. I wouldn't recommend this as an introductory read for those interested in Pynchon. In retrospect and I'm only about twenty pages into it , I would recommend V. All in all, these pieces just remind me once again, of how integral Pynchon's imperfections are to his accomplishments in the realm of twentieth-century fiction. Worth the read for Pynchon's introduction to the book and the story "Entropy. As for a starting point, it could work, but I still think his novels outpace any of his stories. I read this because Gravity's Rainbow has claimed me as a victim five times now. I've yet to get past page One day. Apr 07, Garima marked it as to-read Shelves: mycents , short-stories , pynchon-quest. Not an ideal Pynchon introduction, so stalled for now. I need a screaming across the sky I guess. View all 5 comments. The issue is all the more curious when reading "Slow Learner," a collection of five of Pynchon's earliest short stories, four of them written while still in college, and annotated in the present day This might change later, but right now, I'm less interested in What Pynchon Has To Tell Me than I am in How Pynchon Became Pynchon. The issue is all the more curious when reading "Slow Learner," a collection of five of Pynchon's earliest short stories, four of them written while still in college, and annotated in the present day by the author in the form of a skeptical, slightly embarrassed 20 page introduction. I tore into the stories first, winding around back to the analysis afterward so that I could enjoy the works on their own merits first. The collection starts with "The Small Rain" , a surprisingly linear and conventional tale of a wannabe lifetime enlisted man and his time spent helping out when his troop is called down south for disaster duty. Nathan "Lardass" Levine plans to spend his life in the military, but everyone around him sees he could probably do better, if he wants. The story has a Salinger feel to it, probably one of the first hints for folks who thought Pynchon might in fact be Salinger under a pseudonym. Our author dismisses this work as hopelessly hack, its contrived accents ringing false and its attempts to shoehorn literary motifs into a slight story its greatest crimes. It's not as bad as all that, but I'd be hard pressed to imagine reading it a second time. Strangeness creeps in with "Low-Lands," originally published in Dennis Flange is kicked out of the house presumably for good by his wife for the crime of inviting the garbage man downstairs to drink and tell dirty jokes in his man-cave. The two join a junkyard operator, who takes them to a back room where they drink wine and tell stories about their enlisted days. Pynchon bemoans the casual racism and sexism of his characters, noting that it probably was less of an ironic and more of a legitimate set of prejudices of his younger self. This is also the start of Pynchon's funny names -- there's Dennis Flange and also Pig Bodine and the junkyard-man Bolingbroke. Flange is brought out of deep sleep by Nerissa, a magical little person who takes him to her trash-city deeper in the junkyard. It's all very dreamy and strange, but elements of later stories are definitely starting to come out. It's set in the wee hours of a multi-day lease-breaking college party, as guests come and go, exclaiming pseudo-profundities and pantomiming silent string quartets for the entertainment of the drunken assemblage. I will spare everyone a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. I think I took the word from T. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse of the word is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time on words alone. For me, I find the story to be an amusing look at the time, the heedless weirdness that came at the tail end of the '50s, when young people started to reach for their first tastes of decadence and freedom. If it's overstuffed with incomprehensible digressions about the nature of entropy, well hey, who hasn't held court on stupider subjects at a college party? It's also the first funny story we've seen so far. I had a hell of a time with "Under the Rose" from start to finish. The story takes place in the late s, just as we're about to become to the 20th century. Its about spies in Egypt and surrounding areas who are assigned to track a dignitary, and it involves love triangles, romantic rivalries, friction between the old guard and the new ways, and a bit of slapstick. Not only is the prose style someone archaic, but Pynchon insists on using every possible street name, city name, and the exact path to get to each. He notes that he had probably pilfered a fair amount of this from an guidebook to modern Egypt. The writer and his first attempts to write something that's outside of his realm of experience. This is also a Golden Age of Weird Pynchon Names, so you'll find yourself re-reading the names Porpentine, Moldweorp, Voslauer, and the most Pynchon name of all, Bongo-Shaftbury, with maddening regularity. This is the first story where Pynchon lets himself off the hook more than I did. I found this an awful, tedious slog towards nothing in particular. A few tumbles down the stairs and police fracases at the opera later, and I really couldn't figure out what more I knew about the spy Porpentine at the end than I did at the beginner, other than, to quote Danny Glover, that he's Getting Too Old For This Shit. The final story is noteworthy, as it's the only one to have been written and published after Pynchon's first novel, "V. Made up of real, fascinating people kids, mostly Pynchon may lambaste himself for making the kids occasionally stupider than they need to be and transplanting his hometown locations and experiences to a more tony New England climate, but there's not much else to dislike here. The kids are still kids, they have fun with their secret inner lives, but also with their inventions, their adventures, and their increasingly ambitious pranks on the town. They see their parents acting horribly to the black family that just moved in, and they want to lash out, but don't quite know how yet. Their one black friend, Carl, is a natural fit for the group, and the four of them are as thick as thieves. The give and take between childhood innocence and the first realizations of the grotesqueries of adulthood is handled as well here as any author I can think of that specializes in this time of life, and the twist at the end comes completely out of nowhere.
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