Books

A Fine copy of the book with a previous owner's bookplate on the front end paper, otherwise clean and unmarked. In a bright, Near Fine dust jacket that is price clipped, but otherwise presents very well. The author's third book, winner of the National Book Award and the William Dean Howell Award and published in an edition of just 4,000 copies. Pynchon's post-modern masterpiece, a rich, vertiginous book of sometimes frustrating complexity. Written in 1973, and set at the end of World War II, Gravity's Rainbow would be awarded both the National Book Award and be selected for the Pulitzer Prize. (Although it was denied the latter by the Pulitzer board on account of a particularly controversial passage.) Writing in The New Yorker, poet L. E. Sissman called Pynchon a "mathematician of prose" - and this is considered his greatest work. Gravity's Rainbow appears on Time's list of the 100 greatest English language novels written from 1923 to 2005. "A work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis" (Contemporary New York Times review). Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.