Gravity's Rainbow

A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub<BR><BR>The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. <BR><BR>“A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph <BR><BR>“Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post<BR><BR>“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —The Los Angeles Times<BR><BR>Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

The inspiration for One Battle After Another<BR><BR>Thomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dream<BR><BR>Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.<BR><BR>Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.<BR><BR>'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse. <BR><BR>We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Milwaukee, 1932: Amerika steckt in der Großen Depression, die Aufhebung der Prohibition steht kurz bevor, Al Capone sitzt im Knast. Hicks McTaggart, Privatdetektiv, nimmt einen Routinejob an: Er soll die ausgebüxte Erbin eines Käse-Fabrikanten ausfindig machen und nach Hause bringen. Doch unversehens findet er sich auf einem Ozeandampfer wieder und landet schließlich fern jedem Seehafen in Ungarn, wo eine Sprache wie von einem anderen Stern gesprochen wird und es genug Backwaren gibt, um einen Detektiv bis ans Lebensende zu versorgen, aber jede Spur von der flüchtigen Erbin fehlt. Als Hicks sie endlich gefunden hat, steckt er bis zum Hals in Verwicklungen mit Nazis, sowjetischen Agenten, britischen Gegenspionen, Swing-Musikern und Liebhabern paranormaler Praktiken. Der einzige Hoffnungsschimmer am Horizont: Es kündigt sich die große Zeit der Big Bands an, und zufällig ist Hicks ein ziemlich guter Tänzer. Ob das ausreicht, um im Lindy-Hop-Schritt nach Milwaukee und in die normale Welt zurückzukehren, die es vielleicht gar nicht mehr gibt, steht auf einem anderen Blatt.

Ein Meisterwerk der postmodernen Literatur, das die Grenzen zwischen Realität und Fiktion verschwimmen lässt.In Die Enden der Parabel entwirft Thomas Pynchon ein schillerndes Pandämonium, in dem die Entwicklung und der Einsatz der deutschen V2-Raketen im Zweiten Weltkrieg nur einen der zahllosen Handlungsstränge darstellen. Die parabelförmige Flugbahn dieser Waffen wird zum Symbol für die besiegte Schwerkraft, aber auch für eine hybride Männlichkeit mit katastrophalen Auswirkungen.Pynchons großer Roman führt den Leser durch eine unabsehbare Fülle von Ereignissen und Schauplätzen, von London bis Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Thüringen. Mit seiner einzigartigen Sprache und seinem komplexen Stil ist Die Enden der Parabel zu einem Mythos der modernen Literatur geworden, der die Grenzen des Erzählbaren auslotet und immer wieder neu definiert.

Winner of the National Book Award<BR><BR>"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic<BR><BR>“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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper.

Discover Thomas Pynchon's brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic.<BR><BR> 'The greatest, wildest author of his generation' Guardian<BR><BR>We 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. <BR><BR>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.

Oedipa Maas has been made executrix of her former lover's estate.<BR><BR>The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49.<BR><BR>Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the shortest of Pynchon's great, dazzling novels - and one of his most iconic.<BR><BR>'The best American novel I have read since the war' Frank Kermode<BR><BR>'Remarkable... The Crying of Lot 49 resembles metaphysical poetry in the range of its allusions and the curiosity of its creator' Washington Post

Die Hausfrau Oedipa Maas wird zur Testamentsvollstreckerin ihres ehemaligen Liebhabers bestimmt, des Immobilienspekulanten Pierce Inverarity. Sie macht sich auf den Weg durch Kalifornien und versucht herauszufinden, wer Pierce Inverarity war, wer sie selbst und was Amerika ist, und lernt dabei eine andere Welt als ihre bisherige kennen, die völlig anderen Regeln folgt. Umgeben von Ausgeflippten, Isolierten und Verstörten, die von der Welt ausgeschieden worden sind wie Abfall, scheint Oedipa einer jahrhundertealten Gegenverschwörung auf die Spur zu kommen. Oder ist alles nur eine Fiktion, ein Wahn? (lib)

Read the cult classic behind the major new film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin.<BR><BR>Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.<BR><BR>It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.<BR><BR>In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there...or...if you were there, then you...or, wait, is it...

Ein episches Meisterwerk über Macht, Dynamit und Geldgier - von der Weltausstellung 1893 bis nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.In Gegen den Tag entführt Thomas Pynchon die Leser auf eine schwindelerregende Reise um die Welt und durch die Zeit. Der Roman umspannt den Zeitraum zwischen der Weltausstellung in Chicago 1893 und den Jahren kurz nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Er führt von Colorado über London und Göttingen, Venedig und Wien, den Balkan, Sibirien bis zum Hollywood der Stummfilmära.Mit grenzenloser Fantasie und schrägem Humor erzählt Pynchon eine Geschichte von Macht, Sprengstoff und ungezügelter Gier. Er verwebt historische Ereignisse mit fiktiven Elementen zu einer alternativen Weltgeschichte, in der die Grenzen zwischen Realität und Fantasie verschwimmen. Ein vielschichtiges Epos über Kapitalismus, Terrorismus, Politik und Popkultur. 'Vielleicht ist dies nicht die Welt, aber mit ein, zwei kleinen Änderungen könnte sie es sein.' Eine ebenso provozierende wie unterhaltsame Lektüre, die Pynchons Ruf als literarisches Genie festigt. 'Ein Meisterwerk, wie man es als Literaturkritiker vielleicht nur einmal in seinem Leben annoncieren darf ... aktueller als hier hat Pynchon nie geschrieben.' Denis Scheck

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York; from London to Venice, to Siberia, to Mexico during the revolution; silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. <BR><BR>It is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what the world might be.