In a message passed through his publisher—and presumably conveyed through a too-brief-to-trace phone call in a voice distorted by a vocoder—Thomas Pynchon has sort-of-announced that he will release a new novel sometime in 2013, his first since 2009's Inherent Vice. According to Penguin Press, the book will be titled The Bleeding Edge, though of course, little else is known about it so far. That is, other than it will likely be published in digital editions amid Pynchon's protests, and that it will almost assuredly be full of dense thickets of reference to science and obscure history, allusions to lowbrow pop culture, puns, and goofy song lyrics, all caught up in a delightful tangle of postmodernism and hysterical realism. Or maybe Pynchon has decided, at age 75, to just chuck all that and write an old-fashioned pulp horror novel, maybe one about a murderous hockey player. The cover could be an ice skate with blood dripping down it. You can have that, Thomas Pynchon.

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