Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket Updates

Well, it appears the cover art for Shadow Ticket is taking shape is set. A friend received an Advance Reading Copy (ARC) with the cover shown at left. You can now pre-order it at Amazon.com. And, assuming the cover art displayed on Penguin Random House’s UK website is correct, the UK edition of Shadow Ticket will be similar but with different typography.

The page count is 293 for the US ARC, although it states 304 on the back cover.

Publication is slated for October 7, 2025 and, as stated above, review copies began being sent out around August 1 or so.

You can now pre-order Shadow Ticket from Amazon, for $27.

Thoughts on the Title

From The TravelAsker website:

“A shadow ticket is a type of airline ticket that is purchased from a third-party seller, also known as a broker. These tickets are not sold directly by the airline, and they are typically sold at a lower price than the airline’s published fares. Shadow tickets are also sometimes called consolidator tickets, bucket shop tickets, or wholesale tickets.”

From the StackExchange website, asked 6 years ago:

“I have been told that you can go online with Lufthansa and book a “shadow ticket” which makes a reservation for travel without payment and that you can renew this “shadow ticket” every 24 hours. Has anyone heard of this or know who I could contact at Lufthansa to get this information? Customer service had no idea.”

A Note on the Black & White Cover Photo

At left is another photo of Művész Színház in downtown Budapest, from an angle similar to the Shadow Ticket cover art. The theater was founded in 1932 by Artúr Bárdos (1882-1974), a Hungarian theater director, radio and film director, aesthete, university tutor, theater writer, poet, playwright, publicist, and founding editor of the journal Színjáték. The venture ended in complete bankruptcy. (From Wikipedia, Hungarian version)

The Pynchon-penned blurb:

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Shadow Ticket will be published in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape

Shadow Ticket will be published simultaneously in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape, a Penguin Random House imprint, on October 7, 2025. According to Blackwell’s website, the U.K. edition will be 432 pages. However, Penguin Random House’s U.K. website states it will be 304 pages. I guess they’re still working it out…

As mentioned above, the typography for the U.K. edition is different, at least at this point, and perhaps a bit better. Or perhaps the slightly diagonal font of the U.S. edition is meant to brand this new novel to be in a genre akin to his two previous novels (both also Detective or Noir fiction) &151; Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice — which have a similar typographical treatment?

And Finally… A Spotify Playlist!

Several months ago, Spotify user Kauê Nunes published a Shadow Ticket playlist on Spotify! I’ve reached out to him to see what’s up, so we’ll see… The “cover” image is very cool!