Gravity's Rainbow Audiobook

Winner of the 1974 National Book Award, 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.

“The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop’s erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop’s quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader’s interpretation.”

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“Pynchon’s masterwork is vast, sprawling, and chaotic. Here its frenzied prose is balanced and stabilized by George Guidall’s calm voice. Pynchon is the poet laureate of paranoia, so the reassuringly sane narration helps us pretend that this is all happening in something like the real world. Guidall doesn’t try to create individualized voices for all the major characters, but neither does Pynchon, really. You can tell who is speaking at all times, and that has to be enough. This is an audiobook to immerse yourself in, and if you don’t quite follow the story—and you won’t unless you’ve already read the book a few times—just have faith that you’re in expert hands.”

— AudioFile