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Found in My Life* by Leon Trotsky.

Found in The Cinema as Art* by Ralph Stephenson and Jean R. Debrix.

Found in Player One* by Douglas Coupland.

Found in The Cinema as Art* by Ralph Stephenson and Jean R. Debrix.

Found in The Cinema as Art* by Ralph Stephenson and Jean R. Debrix.

Found in War and Peace in the Global Village* by Marshall McLuhan

When I was finishing my Ph.D., I thought a great deal about the kind of dissertation-length project that would hold my interest … and even be fun. I had done my master’s thesis on Tom Robbins.* That was a topic that made it a little easier to write my first long paper. But a dissertation might be five times the length of my thesis. First I thought about Nabokov,* who I had been spending much of my time reading and studying. By the time I found a suitable topic (something about the philosophical treatment of time in his novels as I recall), I realized it had already been written by someone else. And in retrospect, that seems like a good way to make some great novels seem pretty boring.

I settled on Thomas Pynchon,* a long-time favorite. I was always taken with the strange character names. So I decided to compile a dictionary of all of them. I brought together as many readings as I could find and offered my own interpretations and ideas. Overall, the process was pretty fun … well, as fun as writing a dissertation can be. While I tried to get it published, I added all the names from Against the Day,* which had been published in the meantime. Finally, McFarland brought it out in 2008 as a slim and somewhat pricey paperback. You should buy it just the same. I have lots of new notes and names, and now there is another novel, Inherent Vice.* Someday, I really should prepare a new edition. Don’t look for it in the near future, though.

Found in V. (Perennial Classics)* by Thomas Pynchon.

Found in Young Adam* by Alexander Trocchi

Found in The Search Within* by Theodore Reik

Found in Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats* by W.B. Yeats

Found in Crucibles The Story of Chemistry* by Bernard Jaffe

Found in Shakespeare’s English Kings* by Peter Saccio

Found in Texts & Pretexts* by Aldous Huxley

Found in The Mandarins* by Simone de Beauvoir

Found in The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoevski