John Leonard is remembered far more as a critic, if he’s remembered at all. He was one of the first to champion two giants of letters: Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez. And yet, Leonard was an impressive novelist in his own right. Crybaby of the Western World, published in 1969, reads like a lost Thomas Pynchon novel, not only because the prose is so zany and energetic, suffused with wordplay and allusions and songs and poetry and then some, but also because it’s set in California and wrestles with many of the concepts Pynchon has wrestled with throughout his long career: identity and purpose in a world made unrecognizable by both modern and future tech, the philosophy and economics and psychology that have created the duality known as East versus West, government- and drug-fueled paranoia, and the like. As it happens, Leonard was born in Washington, D.C., and only later attended the University of California, Berkeley, after dropping out of Harvard in his second year. Therefore, he brings an outsider’s perspective to his depictions of California, much like Pynchon, who lived there during the 60s and early 70s as he worked on his monsterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). He set The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) in California, and would later revisit the state in Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009).

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George Salis is the author of Sea Above, Sun Below and Morphological Echoes. His fiction is featured in The Dark, Black Dandy, Zizzle Literary Magazine, House of Zolo, Three Crows Magazine, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Isacoustic, Atticus Review, and The Tishman Review, and his science article on the mechanics of natural evil was featured in Skeptic. He has taught in Bulgaria, China, and Poland. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. Find him on Bluesky, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter, and at www.GeorgeSalis.com.