This book provides numerous new interpretations of Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, arguably the most epistemologically complex novel, page for page, ever written. One of the continuing surprises of the 1960s was that such a novel was destined to become a blockbuster. The continual flow of new editions demonstrates that THE CRYING OF LOT 49 has remained a major seller well into the first decade of the 21st century. It is not surprising that J. Kerry Grant reported that some "Forty years after its first publication, THE CRYING OF LOT 49] is still selling at the rate of between fifteen...

The artist, Leila Daw, and the critic, Robert E. Kohn, discover some mutually binding interests. In her artworks, ostensibly exploring the concepts of mapping, Kohn recognizes the brightly colored dots, zigzags, grids, sets of parallel lines, and nested curves that pulsate in the Paleolithic cave paintings, suggesting that her art-enabling genes carry the memory of those geometric forms from tens of thousands of years ago. She had not been aware of this influence on her work and excitedly wonders "if this is why I'm so interested in ancient sites and paleolithic and neolithic art." When Kohn...

It is generally presumed that the narrator of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a single individual, anonymous, and for the most part aligned with the author. Kohn argues that this novel is better understood if specific co-narrators are presumed, namely Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman, Elise Miltenberger, and Sigmund Freud. Darwin's presence sharpens the contrast between those characters in The Awakening who exhibit the genetically driven, adaptive behavior that enabled early humans to survive, as opposed to those characters who do not. The motives for Edna Pontellier's suicide are less than...

Bill Kohn's painting Udaipur Tinsmiths contrasts his own aesthetic preferences with that of his adversary Clement Greenberg by exaggerating their differences with parody and pastiche. This is a typical Postmodern approach for repudiating claims, like Greenberg's, of narrow rules Modernist artists must follow to ensure the legitimacy of their work. In the case of Abstract Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction, based on Robert E. Kohn's reading of Andreas Huyssen, Postmodernism failed. Though it was justified in rejecting Modernism, "such rejection," Huyssen argued (page 49), affects...