Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge book trailer from The Penguin Press on Vimeo.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Bleeding Edge comes out in two weeks, and details have been scarce aside from a press blurb introducing the book’s setting (“2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th”). And now there’s an appropriately odd book trailer: a five-minute interview with a character named “Sleazus, an Upper West Side Macher,” who happens to be wearing a T-shirt reading “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon.”

Sleazus places smoked salmon on his face as an “exfoliant,” examines a row of Philip Roth photos on a bulletin board, and describes the protagonist of Bleeding Edge, uncertified fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow. The Penguin Press claims the video was produced by Riz Sauvage Productions, a company that doesn't seem to actually exist. As GalleyCat also points out, Pynchon narrated the trailer for Inherent Vice back in 2009, so it’s certainly possible that there’s more going on in this video than meets the eye. Feel free to scour each frame for a potential Hitchcockian cameo somewhere in the background.