During a conversation with Leonard Pierce of the "A.V. Club", Harold Bloom said, "I don't know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century... it would probably be "Mason & Dixon", if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be "The Crying of Lot 49". Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare."