The Crying of Lot 49

‘One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real-estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary...’

The death of her ex-lover sets Oedipa on a trail of delirious weirdness which leads from her husband, Mucho Mass (who is fond of Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, but doesn't believe in them), through Dr Hilarius, Freudian shrink and ex-Buchenwald intem (‘If I'd been a real Nazi, I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr?’), the bizarre postal network of outcasts called W.A.S.T.E, Genghis Cohen, the most eminent philatelist in L.A., Yoyodyne Inc. (‘High above the L.A. freeways/And the traffick's whine/Stands the well-known Galactronics/Branch of Yoyodyne’), not to mention Randolph Driblette and Messrs Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, Attorneys...

Until, finally, Oedipa stands alone, awaiting the final revelation — the Crying of Lot 49.

Cover illustration by Candida Amsden

The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy.

When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.