Pictures Showing What Happens On Each Page Of Thomas Pynchon's Novel, "Gravity's Rainbow"

Zak Smith; Foreward by Steve Erickson

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), set in an alternative-universe version of World War II, has been called a modern Finnegan's Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers' experience of the book. A leading exponent of punk-based, DIY art, Smith here presents his most ambitious project to date -- an art book exactly as long as the work it's interpreting: 760 drawings, paintings, photos, and less definable images in 760 pages. Extraordinary tableaux of the detritus of war — a burned-out Koenigstiger tank, a melted machine gun — coexist alongside such phantasmagoric Pynchon inventions as the "stumbling bird" and "Girgori the octopus." Smith has stated his aim to be "as literal as possible" in interpreting Gravity's Rainbow, but his images are as imaginative and powerfully unique as the prose they honor.

(From Amazon.com)

Nineteen Eighty-Four

By George Orwell; Foreword by Thomas Pynchon

Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to reward it. So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around, the case might yet remain something shy of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?"

- David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle Book Critic
(Read the Complete Review)

It turns out that the Nazis had some success tapping into the Zero Point Energy Field, and were well on the way to building a completely new type of antigravity aircraft/infinite power supply/super weapon. At the end of WWII, the Soviets and Americans managed to scoop up not only the scientists involved in this research (many of whom were blatant Nazi sympathizers), but also the devices they had been developing. These technologies have since gone "deep black," that is to say, have been buried in the deepest recesses of the military industrial complex and intelligence apparatus.

An excellent book on the evolution of plastic in the USA. And a great chapter about Pynchon and plastic.

"A demented, deadpan comic wonder, this rude salute to the dark side of contract employment has the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud."

– Thomas Pynchon