Reading Groups

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland with Matilda Lin Berke

5 Sessions Sundays, 1:00 pm EDT - 2:30 pm EDT July 13 to August 10, 2025

The Center for Fiction

The ‘With Books’ option includes the title required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/13, 7/20, 7/27, 8/3, 8/10
In Person at The Center for Fiction

In advance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s (very loose) film adaptation of what many consider to be Thomas Pynchon’s most accessible full-length work, we will be reading Vineland in the context of contemporary paranoia and our rapidly shifting sociopolitical climate. While this rollicking systems novel skewers the surreal misadventures of an extensive cast of characters, it also offers moments of sincerity and possibly even prescriptions for how to function in a society at war with itself.

Vineland marked Pynchon’s return to public literary life after a 17-year hiatus following the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is arguably the author’s magnum opus. This course will examine how Pynchon contends (this time in a comparatively light, funny format) with many of the questions that have become central to postmodernism. What is mass culture, and especially in our day, does culture exist outside of it? In the long shadow of institutions and their machinations, is it possible to recapture anything resembling an individual life?

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read chapters 1-3 of Vineland.

What to expect from this reading group: This class will begin in a more structured, instructor-driven format before transitioning into a more conversational model as participants gain more familiarity with the material and one another

Reading List:

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Led by

Matilda Lin Berke

Matilda Lin Berke

Matilda Lin Berke is from Los Angeles. Now she lives in New York. She writes object, process, and image theory for Spike Art magazine; you can read her series, “Girlblogging,” in Filmmaker magazine. Her criticism, fiction, and poetry appears in Byline, Forever, the Whitney Review, Grand Journal, the Adroit Journal, and Hobart. Current projects include an essay collection (tentatively titled Machine Learning) and a novel: Industry Plant.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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