Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller (Illustrator)
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(Paperback - Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
- Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
- Pub. Date: October 2006
- ISBN-13: 9780143039945
- Sales Rank: 12,651
- 776pp
- Edition Description: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
- Other Formats:
- Paperback - Reprint
Synopsis
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
Annotation
1974 National Book Award Winner.
Many narrative threads make up a story that may or may not be about the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. The book's main character, Slothrop, undertakes a quest for the truth about the rockets that leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his varied interpretations and the reader's.
Library Journal
These six very different titles are the latest crop of Penguin's redesigned "Classics Deluxe Editions" Each volume features kick-ass covers drawn by some of today's top graphic artists, including Frank Miller, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Thomas Ott, Chester Brown, and Tomer Hanuka, with introductions by the likes of Jonathan Lethem and Doris Lessing. Note that the de Sade cover features some nudity and the Lawrence graphics include comics using the F-word and depicting sex acts, so proceed with caution (you'll laugh, but some of your patrons may not). Nonetheless, all beauties. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
A huge modern influence, Thomas Pynchon's reputation as a contemporary literary giant is only enhanced by his adamant reclusivity (the photo shown here is one of the few of him ever to be published). His prose is so intimidatingly dense, his novels so thematically grand, that he presents a rewarding challenge to his readers and his would-be protegees.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
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- Ratings: 13Reviews: 13
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Not exactly light readingby Anonymous
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October 10, 2008: This is one of those books that I enjoy reading, partly for the challenge of it. Each time I come back to different parts of it, I think understand a little more of what the author was getting at. Even without that, the book is enjoyable for the quality of the writing, the humor and the weirdness.
A reviewerby Anonymous
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July 05, 2008: I picked up GR in preparation for a 20-hour journey from Minneapolis to Hong Kong. Shy of digging a hole and rationing meals to every 100-page mark, there really is no better way to commit yourself to Pynchon. In a pinch, I'd call him a sloppy genius. In a 780-page oeuvre, I'd borrow from his synesthetic narrative some image, discrete and cyclical, some paradox, afterthought and, at once, summing of all existential questions. The book is heavy and dense, literally. Pynchon's themes will at first seem disparate- his scope and style lend themselves to a chaotic appearance- but as you pass milestones in GR and (please, please, please) revisit notable passages, you'll come to see that he leaves no loose ends. He casts no character, no idea, no symbol by the wayside, surely not for good. GR seems to me like poetry written in blank verse. That verse just happens to come in torrential blocks, and to drain the better part of its reader's will power. The novel tackles huge ideas in abstraction. It's insufferably dense, tedious, and self-indulgent, but, in the end, the gems you'll have to cherish will more than justify the effort of slogging through.
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