Earlier this week, a remarkable story appeared on the website of Harper’s: Art Winslow, the respected critic and former literary editor of The Nation, wrote that he had, perhaps, found a new, pseudonymous novel by the reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon. The novel in question, he explained, was Cow Country by Adrian Jones Pearson, the first book from Cow Eye Press, which appeared to have been created to publish it. To call Cow Country obscure would be an overstatement: published in April of 2014, it hadn’t made a blip on any literary radar. Before Winslow’s bombshell, the book had been quietly received two reviews that had been paid for by the author—in the Midwest Book Review and the trade publication Kirkus—and a third in the obscure San Francisco Book Review.

Winslow’s evidence was scant, but his argument was persuasive. To begin with, Pearson admitted to using a pseudonym, and his rationale—explained in an “interview” published by Cow Eye Press—echoed Pynchon’s stance on literary fame and public figuredom. “I’ve always had a severe distaste for all the mindless biographical drivel that serves to prop up this or that writer,” said Pearson. “So much effort goes into credentialing the creator that we lose sight of the creation itself, with the consequence being that we tend to read authors instead of their works. In fact, we’d probably prefer to read a crap book by a well-known writer than a great book by a writer who may happen to be obscure.”

Pearson’s sensibility and style also matched Pynchon’s—or at least, it didn’t seem like a stretch to think there were significant overlaps. Cow Country, a satire of academia set at Cow Eye Community College, is full of in-jokes and goofs, silly characters and place names. According to Winslow, it also “seems to revel in its own delight of cultural esoterica, and it displays both a fondness for and a corresponding suspicion of countercultural motifs of the 1960s–70s.” Finally, there was thematic consistency: Cow Country shared with Pynchon’s novels a “feeling of dislocation, as if one were in a box with no side labeled ‘UP’ for orientation.”

And yet, for all of the similarities, there simply was no proof. Cow Eye Press LLC had been registered in Wyoming by a company that, as Winslow found, “offers virtual offices in a locale ‘known for business-friendliness and respect for privacy.’” Further internet searches revealed that the young press had submitted its documentation online. The playfully detailed (and, admittedly, very Pynchon-esque) websites for Cow Eye Press and Cow Eye Community College had been registered using a proxy registrar in October of 2014 and January of 2015, respectively. And Adrian Jones Pearson, Cow Eye Press, and Cow Eye Community College were on Facebook, but there were no smoking guns—and practically no friends or likes—on any of the pages. The trail was cold.

Perhaps owing to this lack of hard evidence, Winslow’s 3,000-word speculation ends up being something of a bait and switch. Beginning with the tantalizing possibility that there is a new Pynchon novel hiding in plain sight, he concludes with a major caveat: “Personally, I think that chance”—that Pynchon is the author—“is small, and encourage any reader who enjoys Pynchon’s work to check out Cow Country.”