This month’s featured titles include fiction from A&S alum Thomas Pynchon ’59, an award-winning poetry collection and a study of a small town.
Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon ’59
The hero of Pynchon’s latest novel—his first in more than a decade—is one Hicks McTaggart, a private eye searching for a missing cheese heiress in early 1930s Wisconsin.
“He’s another of Pynchon’s aw-shucks metaphysical detectives,” says a New York Times review, “‘a big ape with a light touch,’ as an admiring woman puts it.”
Naturally, in typical Pynchon fashion, the plot is secondary to an immersion into a singular world—one laden with digressions, odd acronyms, and hints of the surreal.
“There are droll and erudite disquisitions (and throwaway lines) on bomb-making and tacky lamps and how to bake bowling balls,” the Times observes. “Strange casseroles are served, Vernors ginger ale is celebrated, and Harley Davidson flatheads are driven to vivid effect. Hooch wagons are exploded, mickeys are slipped, a trans-Atlantic voyage is undertaken.”
The Washington Post calls Shadow Ticket “rollicking, genially silly, and ultimately sweet.”
One Size Fits None
Alejandro Juárez Crawford ’95, BA ’96 & Miriam Plavin-Masterman ’93
The two alums co-host the podcast What if Instead?—which, per its description, is about “everyday people reimagining the way things work—and tackling the obstacles they face.” Now, they’ve parlayed the podcast into a book that explores its principles. Crawford majored in history in A&S.
Subtitled Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution, it contemplates the challenges of our “unresponsive” economic system—one in which factors like politics, inequity, and a myopic drive for cost savings have combined to make many aspects of life and commerce frustrating and unproductive.
The canonical example they cite is the customer service rabbit hole, with its lack of human interaction and inability to address issues that fall outside narrow parameters.
Haunt Me
José Enrique Medina ’91
Medina, a literatures in English graduate, won the prestigious 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize—out of some 3,000 entrants—which garnered him a monetary award and the publication of his debut collection of poetry.
“With dark humor and aching tenderness, Medina conjures Mexican family life, queer whispers, and sacred forgiveness,” says the publisher, the nonprofit Rattle Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting poetry. “This collection asks: what do we inherit from those who vanish? And what becomes of us when the ones we long for stay silent—while those we tried to forget come back, again and again, to remind us who we are?”
Beyond White Picket Fences
Catherine Simpson Bueker ’96
Bueker, an American studies alum, is a sociology professor at Boston’s Emmanuel College. Her nonfiction book—subtitled Evolution of an American Town—examines how the demographics of Wellesley, MA, have changed over the past century.
Although Wellesley “has long been considered the archetypal New England WASP community,” the publisher notes, influxes of Italian, Jewish, and Chinese residents have made it more diverse. While some newcomers opted to assimilate into existing social structures, others created their own. Either way, they changed and enriched the community—though they have sometimes faced racism, antisemitism, and discrimination.
Alexandra Bayer/Cornell University
Shami Chatterjee, associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences; James Cordes, the George Feldstein Professor of Astronomy; and doctoral student Sashabaw Niedbalski, on the roof of the Space Sciences Building next to the Global Radio Explorer Telescope.
