Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is…we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Thomas Pynchon’s literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V., but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here.In his introduction to Slow Learner, the author reviews his early work with disarming candour and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written‘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‘An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers’ New RepublicWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR