Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow by Steve Erickson
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9780977312795
- Page Count
- 784
- Language
- English
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Steve Erickson
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.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has been called a modernFinnegans Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers’ experience of the twentieth-century classic. Smith has created more than 750 pages of drawings, paintings, and photos—each derived from a page of Pynchon’s novel. Extraordinary tableaux of the detritus of war—a burned-out Konigstiger tank, a melted machine gun—coexist alongside such fantasmagoric Pynchon inventions as the “stumbling bird” and “Grigori the octopus.” Smith has said he aimed to be “as literal as possible” in interpreting Gravity’s Rainbow, but his images are as imaginative and powerful as the prose they honor.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has been called a modernFinnegans Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers’ experience of the twentieth-century classic. Smith has created more than 750 pages of drawings, paintings, and photos—each derived from a page of Pynchon’s novel. Extraordinary tableaux of the detritus of war—a burned-out Konigstiger tank, a melted machine gun—coexist alongside such fantasmagoric Pynchon inventions as the “stumbling bird” and “Grigori the octopus.” Smith has said he aimed to be “as literal as possible” in interpreting Gravity’s Rainbow, but his images are as imaginative and powerful as the prose they honor.
Praise for Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
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“The end result of his endeavor is less an illustrated novel than a series of eerie, high art interpretations.”
Marcela Valdes (Washington Post) -
“Zak Smith, with uninhibited bravado and exactly the right kind of insanity, has done something remarkable in [Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow] : created a series of images that approach the richness of their source. He draws a lurid and intoxicating netherworld, complete in its own right and, at the same time, an illuminating companion to the novel.”
Emily Barton (Los Angeles Times) -
“The drawings are surprisingly detailed, colorful and contemplative, adding new layers to the text and potentially earning Pynchon some new fans.”
Whitney Matheson (USA Today)
About the Imprint
Where the literary canon of tomorrow is born. Critically acclaimed titles that challenge, illuminate, and linger. Discover award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from emerging voices you’ll say you found first.
