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

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.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)

[Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow] can be enjoyed on its own or read simultaneously with the 1973 novel, putting Smith's art next to those discursive, intricate, elusive, overwritten sentences.
— Jeff Baker (The Oregonian)Zak Smith was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1976. In addition to theGravity’s Rainbow illustrations, which were shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and are now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Smith’s recent projects include the multipanel painting 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses and an ongoing series of portraits of friends and acquaintances in the sex industry entitled Girls in the Naked Girl Business as well as a number of stand-alone paintings and drawings, abstract and otherwise. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He is a frequent contributor to several independent comics and zines, including Papingand See How Pretty, See How Smart. His first monograph, Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls, was published in 2005.