New, unopened copies from the estate of the late editor, TR Factor.
Note: In 1998, literary sleuth Don Foster was ultimately able to prove that the real author of the Tinasky letters was an obscure poet and writer named Tom Hawkins. Nevertheless, the book remains an intriguing read. The following reviews predate Foster’s discovery.
Reviews
By now you’ve heard the story. A small weekly paper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser of Booneville, California, receives, between 1983 and 1988, dozens of letters from one Wanda Tinasky, bag lady. The letters are intelligent, full of high- and pop-cultural references, sometimes witty, sometimes vulgar, but always funny, suffused with anti-authoritarian politics, and stylistically out of this world... Wildly unstructured in form, they offer Wanda's take on pop culture (shes a big fan of Cagney and Lacey), the literary scene (she claims William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon are the same person), journalism (she campaigns for Anderson to win a Pulitzer Prize), politics local and national (she has a fondness for the old New Left and attacks all ideologies of control), and all other subjects great and small. Her style combines a stand-up comics delivery with easily handled encyclopedic knowledge. (That's what makes me think she’s Pynchon: like him, she seems to know everything.)
Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996
The book not only reprints all the Wanda letters, but accompanies them with a smart and extensive annotated guide to all the arcane literary and local references in them... which makes the book as a whole more than merely an "Is She or Isn't She Pynchon?" debate, but a funny, literate, weirdly touching portrait of an unusual community obsessed by a literary mystery, a shadowy Visitation--in a way, a literary ghost story. But if it's a ghost story, was the specter Thomas Pynchon? Or a remarkably sophisticated but reclusive writer with a Pynchonesque range of allusion and interest, a Pynchonesque feel for the arcana of High and Low culture, a Pynchonesque fondness for ampersands, someone who deployed unmistakably Pynchonesque clues (like "Wanda's" claim to have worked for Boeing Aircraft) who happened to be writing in the Emerald Triangle in the period Mr. Pynchon was living there--but who was not Mr. Pynchon. I find myself unable to make up my mind, but I'm fascinated with Wanda, whoever she or he is. If she isn't Mr. Pynchon, she's still a wonderfully engaging voice whose prose gives, at the very least, some of the surface pleasures of Mr. Pynchon's, and occasionally some of the deeper ones. So I think what I'm going to do is enumerate some of the most Pynchonian passages in Wanda's letters, some of the most Pynchonian clues, for your consideration. Not so much to prove Wanda is Mr. Pynchon, but to explain why I like Wanda, whoever she is. To explore what we talk about when we talk about the "Pynchonesque".
New York Observer 4/28/97