"Possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce... Sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language" London Review of Books "Anything from the most monstrous talent in the post-war West should be pursued in earnest. I've eaten two copies already" Time Out "Thomas Pynchon is the Gargantua of modern fiction... In Slow Learner he breaks cover for the first time with a remarkable open handed portrait of the writer as a young man" Sunday Times "Pynchon at his best" Guardian