Slow Learner

This volume brings together five of Pynchon's early short stories, four of them written while he was a student at Cornell and the fifth in 1964. In the introduction, he describes the genesis of the stories, evokes the cultural idiosyncrasies that attend them, and analyzes each one's strengths and frailities. The five stories are "The Small Rain," "Entropy," "Low-Lands," "The Secret Integration," and "Under the Rose." They reveal Pynchon's earlier grappling with themes which he elaborate in his later works. ISBN 0-316-72442-4 : $14.95.