The William H. Gass Reader

Author: Gass, William H.

Edition: Stated First Edition

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 928

Details:

Throughout his career, William Gass relentlessly pushed at the boundaries of language, celebrating the music of the sentence and the aesthetics of the written word. Now, the best and most important of his work is collected in one volume. There are essays on Plato, Hobbes, James, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Gaddis, Sterne, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Mann. There are pieces that examine the inner workings of writing. There is his masterful short fiction, from the perfectly crafted novella “In Camera” to the mythical “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” And there are excerpts from his novels, including his magnum opus,  The Tunnel. Taken together, this collection is a peerless, essential celebration of literature—and an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to understand how great writing works.

Reviews:

Acclaim for THE WILLIAM H. GASS READER

"A dazzling compendium of fiction and literary essays selected by the author himself at the end of his life ... The book is a banquet ... joyous ... superb."--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"A meaty book of more than 900 pages of short stories, excerpts from his novels, and critical and theoretical essays ... a monument to Gass's brilliance as a postmodern fictioneer and a peerless genius of a critic."--Joseph Peschel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About the Author:

William H. Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction, nine books of essays, and a book of conversations. Gass was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. For most of his life he lived in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, the architect Mary Gass. William Gass died in 2017. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpted from "Retrospection"   “Don’t look back,” Satchel Paige is supposed to have said; “someone may be gaining on you.” Don’t look back, Orpheus was advised; you may find your earlier poems better than the ones you will write tomorrow. Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was so shaken by the sight of the Red Sea swallowing the city she became salt. Look back only if the mess you have made of your life leaves you eager to reach a future that will offer a fairer prospect. Otherwise cover your eyes before blame blinds them the way Oedipus’s pin put out his. However, Paul Valéry warns us that no one “can deliberately walk away from any object without casting a backward glance to make sure he is walking away from it.” For anyone who has reached eighty-seven years, as I have, only the past is likely to have much duration; greed and regret will have eaten the present, which is at best a sliver of cake too small for its plate, while the future fears it may cease before having been. I hear it running to get here, its labored breathing like an old man—eighty-seven—on the stairs. Lust and rage, Yeats rightly said, attend one’s old age. So it is in a spirit of disobedience that I look back at what I may have done rather than toward all that remains to be encountered, coped with, perhaps yet accomplished. I say, “may have done” because what one has really done is never clear and certainly never comforting. Rarely does one say, “I may have married her but only time will tell.” Your station in the literary world, whatever that might be, does not matter much if you’ve spent your life chasing words with Nabokov’s net. That’s still where the results of your life went, into the killing jar, sentenced to a verbal smother, pinned in place, a display that’s initially a cause of mild indifference, and then evermore ignored. Looking back I find it less painful to concentrate on the kind of thing that concerned me, rather than on the messes I made or on the few fragile triumphs I may have enjoyed. Looking back I find I fit the epitaph Howard Nemerov once wrote for himself in Gnomes and Occasions (1973). Of the Great World he knew not much, But his Muse let little in language escape her. Friends sigh and say of him, poor wretch, He w...

EAN: 9781101874745

Release Date: 06-11-2018

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Hardcover Used - Like New Ships fast! 2018Stated First Edition

Item Condition: UsedLikeNew

Binding: Hardcover