The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Travelling 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 “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.” -San Francisco Examiner