Thomas Pynchon has penned short stories, essays, novels, introductions to novels by other writers, one introduction to the collection of his own stories, and liner notes. Yet, beyond this versatility, his refusal to editorialize or establish a unified, authoritative textual voice on whose judgment the reader can rely is conveyed by (among other things) the writer’s deployment of a wide variety of genres, and their complex enmeshing as well as transformations they undergo in his works. Whether his introduction to the collection of short stories, Slow Learner (1984), is a “preface, story [or] autobiography,” may be unclear, and Pynchon’s poetics and politics of genre reach an unprecedented level of sophistication and complexity in his novels. Fuzzily delineated, the genres he uses in his novels create generic hybrids and genre palimpsests. Broader generic categories appear alongside and merge with numerous subgenres familiar from the history of American canonical and popular literature. By parodying the familiar genres, Pynchon subjects to ideological critique the “literary tropes, cultural markers, and reading protocols” that make up those genre, thus playing with “the expectations, needs, or assumptions” of their users.