Despite both the undoubted difficulty of his work and his famous refusal to participate in celebrity literary culture, Thomas Pynchon is in some ways a “popular” author. He has participated in popular culture, for example writing liner notes for a 1996 rock album, contributing to an extended joke about himself for a 1990s sitcom, The John Larroquette Show, and most famously appearing twice – albeit with a paper bag over his head – on The Simpsons. Similarly, despite the fact that his labyrinthine plotting, challenging subject matter, vertiginous shifts in tone, and daunting range of historical, cultural, and scientific reference limit his readership, Pynchon’s novels have won mainstream literary awards, been Book-of-the-Month Club selections and appeared on best-seller lists. Vineland (1990), for example, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times list, debuting at number five between Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Stephen King’s The Dark Half, a coincidence that helps situate his work in relation to high and low cultural forms. For despite their clear high-culture associations, Pynchon’s novels integrate a wide range of text types in what has been described as a “self-consciously ‘literary’ appropriation of popular genres,” and insistently reference aspects of pop culture such as consumer products, TV shows, movies, and songs. This engagement with the popular both contributes to Pynchon’s poetics and plays a key role in his critique of contemporary society.