Gravity's Rainbow

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' GuardianWe 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.

“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, fck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel -- Tom McCarthy, author of 'C'
Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation. -- Ian Rankin Guardian
Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer. -- Thomas Leveritt Independent
Gravity's Rainbow is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted…[Pynchon’s] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels. New York Times
He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy. -- L.E. Sissman New Yorker
Gravity's Rainbow is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated. Washington Post *

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, SlowLearner, 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.

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