"Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human." - Frank McConnell, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.”

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland 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. Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

In the mid-1800s, Charles K. Landis, a visionary and entrepreneur, was looking for land that would be more adaptable to fruit than to grain and suitable also for a wide range of industries. In 1861, Landis developed a parcel of land just north of Millville. Landis set aside 1 square mile called the Borough of Vineland exclusively for homes, businesses, and industry. Beyond that 1 square mile, the land was designated for farming and became Landis Township. In 1952, the citizens of the borough and township voted to merge the two into the City of Vineland, which today remains the largest city in area in New Jersey. Known for its cultural and religious diversity, Vineland's success in farming, business, and industry can be traced to its unique blend of early settlers, natives, and immigrants alike.

Early in the 20th century New Jersey was one of the first states to segregate mentally ill patients in state-run institutions. Administrators and scientists at the Vineland Training School and Skillman Village for Epileptics did research which validated the theory that "feeblemindedness" was inherited, untreatable and associated with anti-social behavior. A statute passed in 1911 that permitted involuntary sterilizations of people with chronic mental disorders and epilepsy was overturned two years later by the state's Supreme Court. Nevertheless, New Jersey eugenicists continued to promote similar legislation in the misguided belief that they were benefiting society. The American example was used to justify racist policies initiated in Nazi Germany where what began with coerced sterilizations of the "unfit" evolved to "mercy killing" and then to genocide. Although forced sterilizations were not performed in New Jersey, in other states more than 65,000 Americans were sterilized against their will. Perhaps this "Tale of Two Villages" will provide an object lesson about how well-meaning but flawed science could become politicized, perverted and lead to shameful outcomes. "I read the entire book in one sitting - that's how transfixed I was by this amazing and fascinating story." -Sherwin Nuland, MD. Professor of Surgery, Yale University School of Medicine. Author, historian and bioethicist. "I read this book with astonishment, outrage and incredulity. It displays a fine balance between objective reporting and moral indignation. We all need to be educated about history - warts and all!" -Andre Ungar, emeritus rabbi. Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley.

In the mid-1800s, Charles K. Landis, a visionary and entrepreneur, was looking for land that would be more adaptable to fruit than to grain and suitable also for a wide range of industries. In 1861, Landis developed a parcel of land just north of Millville. Landis set aside 1 square mile called the Borough of Vineland exclusively for homes, businesses, and industry. Beyond that 1 square mile, the land was designated for farming and became Landis Township. In 1952, the citizens of the borough and township voted to merge the two into the City of Vineland, which today remains the largest city in area in New Jersey. Known for its cultural and religious diversity, Vinelands success in farming, business, and industry can be traced to its unique blend of early settlers, natives, and immigrants alike.

When Daniel's mother dies, he is brought under the protection of the AMO: the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. It is an introduction to a world of revenge, revolution and mind-bending chemicals, where anarchists, alchemists and high-stake gamblers co-exist. It is a place in which magic and murder are the norm. So begins an extraordinary quest for knowledge and understanding in this unforgettable outlaw classic.