“Keita Hatooka’s study of Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales is a compelling model for a combined approach of environmental criticism and postmodernism on a theoretical level and offers a comprehensive reading of Pynchon’s entire novelistic oeuvre for its representation of non-human life in an anthropocentric world. Hatooka is a true pioneer of the still too rare ecocritical approaches to Pynchon and finally gives an English-speaking audience access to Pynchon’s long-standing work in collected, revised, and updated form.”

Sascha Pöhlmann, University of Innsbruck

Keita Hatooka’s Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism offers illuminating readings of Pynchon’s works, situated at the intersection of familiar postmodern touchstones and both classic and more recent ecocritical perspectives. The resultant arguments concerning Pynchon’s representations of non-human animals bring to light the degree to which critics have overlooked important ecological aspects of one of America’s most vital postmodernist authors. Along the way, this book does more than draw attention to neglected aspects of Pynchon’s texts: it shows how Pynchon can help us think better about futures of ecocriticism.

Christopher K. Coffman, Boston University

Ecocritics have long criticized the postmodern tilt toward psychological interiority and rarefied aestheticism, but Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales, in focusing on Pynchon’s fascination with and concern for animals (and for the environment more generally), busts this postmodern myth. Keita Hatooka’s book is a learned, accessible study of what the author refers to as 'postmodern ecocriticism and ecocritical postmodernism.'

Scott Slovic, Oregon Research Institute