Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don't miss this amazing video about Gravity's Rainbow winning the National Book Award, including a recording of Professor Irwin Corey's hilarious acceptance speech.
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Operation Backfire
According to Dieter K. Huzel in his 1962 memoir Peenemünde To Canaveral:
"The British Operation Backfire was designed ... to completely evaluate the entire V-2 system, interrogate German personnel specialized in all phases and subsystems of it, and then actually launch several missiles across the North Sea." The British utilized the hangars and other facilities of the former German Navy Artillery Range at Altenwalde (near Cuxhaven). According to Huzel, such a comprehensive evaluation of the V-2 (or A-4 as the Peenemünders called it) had never been undertaken, not even by the Germans. German security, writes Huzel, would not have allowed such broad coverage; "no one was to know more about the entire system than the absolute minimum required for his own work."
The first British-directed firing of the V-2 across the Baltic occurred on October 2, 1945. The third and last took place on October 15, 1945. There were no significant difficulties. Operation Backfire was completed.
