Books in the Rereadings series

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked book opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel today with an elegiac meditation on how we experience the passage of time.

David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Roberto Bolano's life and work have obscured his achievements-and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. He explores the novel as an epic of social structure and its decomposition.