Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel "Gravity's Rainbow" - Hardcover

Zak Smith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 097731278X ISBN 13: 9780977312788

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

'In his mind-blowing volume Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated (Tin House), porn performer Zak Smith is happy to mix the literal with the surreal whenever and however it suits him. The book renders in graphic form all 760 pages of Thomas Pynchon's famous 1973 novel, described by members of that year's Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene", but which has since then been widely acclaimed... A very special work in its own right, it should be compulsory for Pynchon obsessives.' New Statesman: Thursday 19 July --New Statesman, Thursday 19 July 2007

About the Author:

Zak Smith: Brooklyn, New York Zak Smith was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1976 and grew up in Washington, DC. After receiving a BFA from Cooper Union in 1998, he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University in 2001. Smith's body of work primarily comprises portraits, abstract paintings, and illustrations executed in acrylic. An enduring interest in comic books informs his dynamic and obsessively detailed depictions of people, objects, and stories. Allied with punk and hardcore culture and the DIY aesthetic associated with these movements, Smith draws on traditions of decorative art to produce visually complex, labor-intensive pictures characterized by intricate patterns and vivid coloration. The Gravity's Rainbow illustrations, which were featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Other public collections containing Smith's work include the Museum of Modern Art and the Progressive Corporation. Zak Smith is represented by Fredericks & Freiser in New York City. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Steve Erickson: Los Angeles, CA Steve (Stephen Michael) Erickson is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His seven novelssuch as Our Ecstatic Days and Tours of the Black Clockescape traditional classifications; no literary category describes them adequately. They are usually placed on the borders of surrealism, or magic realism. Currently, he is a teacher with the CalArts MFA writing program and the editor of the literary magazine Black Clock. He also has written about film for Los Angeles magazine since 2001."

About this edition

• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 097731278X
• ISBN 13: 9780977312788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 784