William H. Gass

"Gass has produced a book that burrows inside us then wails like a beast, a book that mainlines a century's terror direct to the brain."—Voice Literary Supplement

The Tunnel

In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

A Philosophical Inquiry

On Being Blue

Five short stories depict love, misfortune and the challenge of midwestern life.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories

In the Heart of the Heart of the Countryis vintage William H. Gass- two novellas and three short stories, set in the Midwest, exhibiting Gass's characteristic and wildly original verbal brilliance and philosophical acuity. The volume includes The Pedersen Kid,a story originally published a few years before the 1965 publication of Gass's first novel Omensetter's Luck. Words populate these stories, as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, neuroses, and properties they describe. No matter how strange or estranged the human consciousness directing each symphony of words, his or her fear, delight, and disgust is uncanny and familiar.

And Other Stories

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Joseph Skizzen's family fled from Austria in 1938 to London where his father disappeared, he and his family then relocated to small town Ohio and Joseph grows up to be a decent piano player with a deeply fractured sense of identity.

Middle C

"Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page. . . . Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein . . . the avant garde . . . the demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's . . . choices in fiction . . . flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review. A 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

Essays

Finding a Form

William Gaddis

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

The Recognitions

Four interconnected novellas explore the themes of mind, matter, God, and the conflict between good and evil. Reprint. evil. Reprint.

Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas

Selections from Gass's essays, criticism, commentary, short stories, and novels, chosen by the author.

The William H. Gass Reader

In this sequel to Fiction & the Figures of Life, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Included are discussions of Valéry, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner, suicide, "art and order," and the transformation of language into poetry and fiction. The vividness and clarity of Gass's writing, the unabashed love and inimitable use of language-his startling metaphors, the sinuousness of his philosophy, the originality of his vision-make each essay a searching revelation of its subject, as well as an example of Gass's own singular artistry.

The World Within The Word Essays

Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."

Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife

Fiction and the Figures of Life

A new collection of essays by the author of Finding a Form explores themes of writing, form and thought while considering the author's life-long attachment to books, in a volume that considers the works of such favorites as Kafka, Nietzsche and Henry James.

Literary Judgments and Accounts

Life Sentences

In a compilation of essays exploring the nature and value of writing, the noted literary critic, essayist, and novelist presents an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his life and work, as well as his thoughts on such disparate authors as Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Stanley Elkin, Gabriel García Márquez, William Gaddis, and others. 10,000 first printing.

A Temple of Texts

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

Reflections on the Problems of Translation

Reading Rilke

Prigionieri del paradiso

In these fourteen witty and elegant essays, William Gass (“the finest prose stylist in America”—Steven Moore, Washington Post) writes about writing, reading, culture, history, politics, and public opinion. In the first of three parts, Gass addresses literary matters and writers, and contemplates, among other things: the nature of narrative and its philosophical implications; experimental fiction and its importance; literary “lists” (including the currently controversial canon of western literature) and their use. In part two, Gass looks at social and political contretemps: the extent and cost of political influences on writers; the First Amendment, the Fatwa, and Salman Rushdie; our view of Germany, as in “How German are we?” Finally, Gass gives us a celebration of Flaubert and considers the problems of writing history. Tests of Timeis William Gass at his most dazzling. It is a high-wire act of thinking and writing that serves up what Vladimir Nabokov called an “indescribable tingle of the spine.”

William H. Gass

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