A Gravity S Rainbow Companion

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."

Steven provides a page-by-page, often line-by-line, guide to the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes and puns around which Pynchon wove his novel. This is a guide book to one of the most important, and intractable, literary works of our time.

Winner of the 1974 National Book Award “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000, through a wildly comic extravaganza that has been hailed in The New Republic as “the most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II.”

This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.

Herman and Weisenburger put the novel's abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control.

Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page features the work of an Ivy League-educated, punk-rock, porn-star visual artist who has created a drawing for every page of a novel that is widely considered to be the most difficult work of literature ever produced in English.

To the uninitiated, Thomas Pynchon’s V. seems to defy comprehension with its open-ended and fragmented narrative, huge cast of characters (some 150 of them), and wide range of often obscure references. J. Kerry Grant’s Companion to “V.” takes us through the novel chapter by chapter, breaking through its daunting surface by summarizing events and clarifying Pynchon’s many allusions. The Companion draws extensively from existing critical and explicative work on V. to suggest the range of interpretations that the novel can support. The hundreds of notes that comprise the Companion are keyed to the three most widely cited editions of V. Most notes are interpretive, but some also provide historical and cultural contexts or help to resurrect other nuances of meaning. Because it does not constitute a particular “reading” of, or “take” on, the novel, the Companion will appeal to a wide range of users. Rather than attempting to make final sense of the novel, the Companion exposes and demystifies Pynchon’s intent to play with our conventional attitudes about fiction.