New Thomas Pynchon novel 'Shadow Ticket' coming October 7
Set in Milwaukee during the Great Depression, 'Shadow Ticket' will be the 87-year-old author's first novel in 12 years.
If you’ve ever confused Thomas Pynchon with Philip Roth, you may be surprised to hear that the former is in fact still alive, much less still writing novels. Today, Penguin Press announced it will publish Pynchon’s ninth novel, Shadow Ticket, on October 7, 2025.
The most surprising part of this might be Shadow Ticket’s Midwestern setting, considering Pynchon’s earlier work “criticized the region as a cultural wasteland.” Here’s the full synopsis (it’s a doozy):
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
Born in 1937, the reclusive Pynchon’s last novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), was a NYT Notable, but he is of course best known for The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Inherent Vice (2009).
Most Pynchon-heads assumed Bleeding Edge would be his last book, including Alex Shepherd, a staff writer at The New Republic. “Five years ago, the National Enquirer stalked Thomas Pynchon for weeks and finally caught him walking to go vote in the fall of 2020,” Shepherd tells me. “The Pynchon in those photographs was then a spritely 82 (maybe 83?) and he looked a bit like Richard Harris did when he played Dumbledore—wizened, sure, but mostly decayed and more than a bit on death's door. I don't know why the National Enquirer did a stakeout of Pynchon, but it's funny and, well, a bit Pynchon-esque. The result wasn't really a scoop: It was just a reminder that Pynchon is extremely old and pretty frail.”
“That's a long way of saying that I had at that point already assumed that Bleeding Edge was his last book, which was a bit disappointing—it's a good novel and I enjoy that it has a reference to Yu-Gi-Oh (or maybe Dragon Ball Z, I don't remember) but it didn't really have the feel of finality. It wasn't a sign-off. This new book may not be that either but honestly who gives a fuck? Everything is so awful right now and we're getting a new Thomas Pynchon novel.”
“Like Lynchian, Pynchonesque is a funny descriptor because the reference point is art that is inimitable. You can give characters funny names and write 800-page novels with zany plots and dozens of characters but no one who has ever tried to write a Pynchonesque book has come close. Getting another one is a gift. Best of all, we're going to get dozens of dumb little songs.”
Shepherd has already emailed Polymarket to “add a tab for us to bet on the length of the book,” but they haven’t responded yet. When the news broke about Shadow Ticket this morning, he and other Pynchon-heads blew up Twitter and BlueSky.
Meanwhile, Paul Thomas Anderson’s next movie, One Battle After Another — which is based on Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) — hits theaters September 26, a couple weeks before Shadow Ticket hits shelves.
Forthcoming in The Frontlist
Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)
April book preview (rather late, I’m afraid)