Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Slow Learner | 1984 | Thomas Pynchon | Buy |
Slow Learner (1984) is Thomas Pynchon’s only published short story collection, gathering five stories he wrote between 1959 and 1964 as a young man. The stories appeared in literary magazines before and during the writing of his first novel, V. (1963), and they show an author still finding his voice but already displaying the verbal energy and structural ambition that would define his later work.
The collection includes “The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration.” “Entropy” has become the most widely anthologized, and “Under the Rose” was later reworked as a chapter of V. The book’s introduction, written by Pynchon himself, is one of his few public autobiographical statements. In it, he critiques his own early stories with unusual frankness, calling out their weaknesses while recalling the post-Beat literary culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Time magazine described the introduction as “Pynchon’s first public gesture toward autobiography.”