{"product_id":"9781101594643","title":"Mason and Dixon","description":"\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e magazine and \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Year  \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the  British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between  Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line.  Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native  Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies  erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take  us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from  their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to  pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet  redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in  conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude  told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlong the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including  Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a  Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a  robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy  and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear  narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in  the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47128029790448,"sku":"9781101594643","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781101594643_p0.jpg?v=1763688421","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781101594643","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}