Gravity's Rainbow

Description

A new edition to celebrate the 40th anniversary of first publication of Pynchon's classic book. Discover Thomas Pynchon's brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic. 'The greatest, wildest author of his generation' Guardian We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn't really begin to cover it. Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As The Financial Times said, 'you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.' Forty years since its publication, Gravity's Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.

Thomas Pynchon was born in Long Island, USA in 1937. He took a scholarship at Cornell University and studied Engineering before switching to study English. He has served in the United States Navy and worked as a technical writer at Boeing. Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon. Against the Day, and most recently Inherent Vice. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

The best seller described as the kind of Ulysses which Joyce might have written if he had been a Boeing engineer with a fetish for quadrille paper * Irish Examiner * Pynchon's masterpiece. -- John Sutherland * Guardian * Thomas Pynchon gives us 20th-century fiction's finest memento mori. -- John Sutherland * The Times * [A] masterpiece -- Marc Chacksfield * ShortList * I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, f*ck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel -- Tom McCarthy, author of 'C'