书名：Gravity's Rainbow万有引力之虹

作者：Thomas Pynchon

出版社名称：Vintage Classics

出版时间：2013

语种：英文

ISBN：9780099511755

商品尺寸：12.9 x 4 x 19.8 cm

包装：平装

页数：912 （以实物为准）

本书Gravity's Rainbow《万有引力之虹》是后现代主义文学中的经典之作，在美国乃至世界20世纪文学史上有着独特的地位，有人称它是当代文学的经典，也有人认为它是一部“预告世界末日”的呓语。

这是一部深刻影响着20世纪下半叶的奇书，一如《尤利西斯》深刻影响着20世纪上半叶，文风大胆离奇，被公认为不可不读的伟大文学作品，入选“时代周刊”史上百部经典小说。电影《骇客帝国》中，尼奥吞下红色药丸的情节，被认为是在向《万有引力之虹》致意。 媒体评论：“这部小说是现代文学和现代科学的一次出鱼结合，完美地阐释了现代历史和历史观的进程。20世纪很少有书能够像本书一样触及如此的广度和深度，更不用说在这样精妙的结构中体现出对我们这个世界恢宏的视野。”——《耶鲁评论》 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 earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it. 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 publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral. Review"The best seller described as the kind of Ulysses which Joyce might have written if he had been a Boeing engineer with a fetish for quadrille paper" (Irish Examiner) "Pynchon’s masterpiece." (John Sutherland Guardian) "I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel"(Tom McCarthy, author of 'C') "Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation." (Ian Rankin Guardian)

这部巨著故事情节复杂，梦境一般的幻想中充满了扑朔迷离、错综复杂的交叉关系，五花八门、古怪零乱的叙述，似是而非的议论以及物理学、火箭工程学、高等数学、心理学、国际政治等的描写。小说的背景是第二次世界大战，德军的V-2火箭频袭伦敦，英美谍报机关发现美国的一位情报军官发生某些行为的地方往往是火箭的落点，便对这种现象进行研究，由此吸引和牵连了许多人和事。

小说的中心意象是火箭。所谓“万有引力之虹”即指火箭发射后形成的抛物弧线，作者同时用它来象征死亡，象征现代文明不可避免走向毁灭的轨迹。

托马斯·品钦，美国后现代主义文学的代表作家。他的作品往往以神秘的荒诞文学与当代科学的交叉结合为特色。他获得过美国全国图书奖，但拒绝领奖。其作品包含着丰富的意旨、风格和主题，涉及到历史、自然科学和数学等不同领域。有评论家称其《万有引力之虹》系借助神力完成，堪称一部大百科全书。他的主要作品有《V》、《拍卖第49批》、《万有引力之虹》、《葡萄园》等。

Thomas Pynchonwas born in Long Island, USA in 1937. He took a scholarship at Cornell University and studied Engineering before switching to study English. He has served in the United States Navy and worked as a technical writer at Boeing. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

A screaming comes across the sky.It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall — soon — it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing. Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and rime: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city... They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, hut no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into — they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass…certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero… and it is poorer the deeper they go ruin our secret cities of poor, places whosenames he hasnever heard… the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.