Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Description

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.

---

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.

Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.

That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.

Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo

---

The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library)

Description

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.

---

Inherent Vice: A Novel

Description

---

"Pynchon flashes the Sixties rock references faster than a Ten Years After guitar solo: His characters walk around wearing T-shirts from Pearls Before Swine, name-drop the Electric Prunes, turn up the Stones' 'Something Happened to Me Yesterday' on the radio. (I had never heard of Bonzo Dog Band's "Bang Bang" before, but it's on my iPod now.) The rock & roll fanboy love on every page is a feast for Pynchon obsessives, since we've always wondered what the man listens to….The songs are fragments in the elegiac tapestry for the Sixties, an era full of hippie slobs who just wanted to be left alone and so accidentally backed into heroic flights of revolutionary imagination. Can you dig it?" --Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

Amazon Exclusive: Thomas Pynchon's Soundtrack to Inherent Vice

Larry "Doc" Sportello is a private eye who sees the world through a sticky dope haze, animated by the music of an era whose hallmarks were peace, love, and revolution. As Doc's strange case grows stranger, his 60s soundtrack--ranging from surf pop and psychedelic rock to eerie instrumentals--picks up pace. Have a listen to some of the songs you'll hear in Inherent Vice—the playlist that follows is designed exclusively for Amazon.com, courtesy of Thomas Pynchon. (Links will take you to individual MP3 downloads, full albums, or artist pages.)

"Bamboo" by Johnny and the Hurricanes "Bang Bang" by The Bonzo Dog Band Bootleg Tape by Elephant's Memory "Can't Buy Me Love" by The Beatles "Desafinado" by Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto, with Charlie Byrd Elusive Butterfly by Bob Lind "Fly Me to the Moon" by Frank Sinatra "Full Moon in Pisces" performed by Lark "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys The Greatest Hits of Tommy James and The Shondells "Happy Trails to You" by Roy Rogers "Help Me, Rhonda" by The Beach Boys "Here Come the Hodads" by The Marketts "The Ice Caps" by Tiny Tim "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd "It Never Entered My Mind" by Andrea Marcovicci "Just the Lasagna (Semi-Bossa Nova)" by Carmine & the Cal-Zones "Long Trip Out" by Spotted Dick "Motion by the Ocean" by The Boards "People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" by The Doors "Pipeline" by The Chantays "Quentin's Theme" (Theme Song from "Dark Shadows") performed by Charles Randolph Grean Sounde Rembetissa by Roza Eskenazi "Repossess Man" by Droolin’ Floyd Womack "Skyful of Hearts" performed by Larry "Doc" Sportello "Something Happened to Me Yesterday" by The Rolling Stones "Something in the Air" by Thunderclap Newman "Soul Gidget" by Meatball Flag "Stranger in Love" performed by The Spaniels "Sugar Sugar" by The Archies "Super Market" by Fapardokly "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen "Telstar" by The Tornados "Tequila" by The Champs Theme Song from "The Big Valley" performed by Beer "There's No Business Like Show Business" by Ethel Merman Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer "Volare" by Domenico Modugno "Wabash Cannonball" by Roy Acuff & His Crazy Tennesseans "Wipeout" by The Surfaris "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys "Yummy Yummy Yummy" performed by Ohio Express

---

---

V. (Perennial Classics)

Description

The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men -- one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose -- and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.

---

Having just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content to lead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition is to perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where "responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the Whole Sick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other than cheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dramatically when he befriends Stencil, an active ambitious young man with an intriguing mission--to find out the identity of a woman named V., who knew Stencil's father during the war, but who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

---

Against the Day

Description

---

Mason & Dixon: A Novel

Description

---

A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.

---