Thomas Pynchon has been one of the most discussed authors of literary modernism since "The Ends of the Parable." He added five short stories to his works that were previously hard to access: "The Little Rain," which explores a world slipping into military misconduct and facing the reality of a natural disaster; "Lowland," which addresses the survival of the living amidst garbage; "Entropy," which deals with the death drive in physical form; "Under the Seal," which presents the confusion of a secret agent in Karl Baedeker's Egypt in 1898; and "The Secret Integration," which depicts the struggle of childish imagination against everyday racism in early 1960s America.