The study analyzes Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow it in terms of Rilke's Duino Elegies, a text which was a major influence on Pynchon's novel.

Now a CBS All Access series: “A riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles” (Booklist). The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene. Fueled by childhood dreams of space flight, Parsons was a leader of the motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a cornerstone of the American space program. But Parsons’s wild imagination also led him into a world of incantations and orgiastic rituals—if he could make rocketry a reality, why not black magic? George Pendle re-creates the world of John Parsons in this dazzling portrait of prewar superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. Peopled with such formidable real-life figures as Howard Hughes, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius. The basis for a new miniseries created by Mark Heyman and produced by Ridley Scott, this biography “vividly tells the story of a mysterious and forgotten man who embodied the contradictions of his time . . . when science fiction crashed into science fact. . . . [It] would make a compelling work of fiction if it weren’t so astonishingly true” (Publishers Weekly).

It is August 2016, one year after the events of Framed.He is promoted to a captain of the NYPD and gets a disturbance call in the Kings Plaza Mall in Brooklyn, N.Y. of what seems to be a hostage situation taking place. When the four arrive at the mall they find that there is indeed a hostage situation, but the hostage takers aren't human. They are glooba aliens that have somehow found a way to enter Earth via the virtual world using black holes. Eventually, the four find out the gloobas are out for revenge. The gloobas vow to get revenge by using the gravitational pull of Earth and attempt to align the planets perfectly to charge their death ray which will wipe Earth off the map! Angel and his friends have to get to the glooba's home planet of Goo before the 10 days are up in order to stop the planets from aligning themselves. Can the four stop the latest revenge plot by the glooba's or will the aliens have their revenge?

Only a few months after fighter pilot Verna Starr, aka Rocket Babe, led DSSF to victory on Mars, all alien abductions ceased. The first interplanetary strike by humans had been almost flawless and provided a window of opportunity for DSSF to gain strength, but soon it looked as though their victory would be short lived. A small number of the Greys survived and while no longer a threat to Earth on their own, their allies, an ancient race believed to be the decendents of fallen angels known as the Nephilim, would soon prove a much greater threat to mankind. Enraged by the attack, the Nephilim were rapidly moving to avenge the Greys. Their leader, Anakim, now bore a deep seeded hatred for all humans and DSSF but above all he had an overwhelming desire to possess and punish the only woman that had ever dared to defy him. In retaliation he meant to bring a firestorm upon Earth like mankind had never seen before. Now in command of fighter squadron SF-1, Jolly Rogers, Rocket Babe and her pilots race to intercept Anakim before he reaches Earth. But if the Nephilim leader can defeat DSSF he will own the entire solar system and rule every life form, including a captured Rocket Babe who would be forced to watch the destruction of everything and everyone she loves as his slave.

When published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon’s extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book’s great theme is domination: humanity’s diminished “chances for freedom” in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket. “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon’s novel in “long sixties” history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel’s abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text’s close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practices—free-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets, and raucously satirical underground presswork—provide a clearer bearing on Pynchon’s own satirical practices and their implicit criticisms. If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured all—even supposedly immune elites—in an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchon’s main characters and storylines, this study realizes a darker Gravity’s Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.

Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

'My dead friend is sending me postcards. It's like a voice from hell.' 'I saw Castro die. A week later the postcards started. One a month - Indonesian breaks, steep peaks over sharp coral. All signed: Castro.' Goog's best mate Castro vanished into the Southern Ocean, but his body was never found. So Goog flies north, chasing the ghost of his dead friend. He hooks up with Niagara - a young American hunting his own illusions - and together they set off on a wild, gritty surf odyssey. But are they actually at the mercy of an unseen puppet master, and what will the find in the surreal shadow-lands of Indonesia? From the author of Rhino Chasers, Indo Dreaming is a vivid and enigmatic novel for anyone who has the spirit of travel wedged in their soul. Grant's ear for speech is unerring Rhino Chasers is powerful and promising debut.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher