Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. Oedipa leaves her home and her husband and heads to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs. Pierce, however, did not intend for the job to be an easy one for Oedipa, and soon she becomes ensared in a surreal, hilarious, and puzzling world-wide conspiracy centered around Pierce's...

"Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . ." On California's fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the "Nixonian Reaction," still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has...

The lives of two 18th century British astronomers who surveyed the boundary which settled a dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and was later extended to become the boundary between free and slave states, the Mason-Dixon line. The novel describes their work in Africa and America, and traces their relationship. By the author of Vineland.

Selections from Prize stories.