The Crying of Lot 49

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy.

When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern

California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

“The work of a virtuoso with prose … His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune