Thomas Pynchon

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
“The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times
“The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune
“A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour...

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide...

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.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia, " watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.

Private eye Doc Sportello's ex-old lady shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a loony bin.