The William H. Gass Reader.

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	814.54 Ga	4-week checkout	Due 05-08-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	814.54 Ga	4-week checkout	Due 04-20-2024

Collects selections from ten books of essays and criticism, three books of short stories, novellas, and novels.
"This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Introduction. Retrospection ; Fifty literary pillars ; On reading to oneself ; Even if, by all the oxen in the world ; The doomed in their sinking -- Omensetter's luck. The love and sorrow of Henry Pimber -- In the heart of the heart of the country. The Pederson kid ; Order of insects ; In the heart of the heart of the country -- The tunnel. The first winter of my married life ; An invocation to the muse ; In my youth ; A fugue ; August bees ; The Sunday drive -- Cartesian sonata. Emma enters a sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's -- Middle C. The piano lesson ; Garden ; The Apocalypse Museum -- Eyes. In camera -- La vie trèshorrificque : Rabelais revisited -- Robert Walser, an introduction -- Half a man, half a metaphor : the unknown Kafka -- Paul Valéry -- A forest of bamboo : the trouble with Nietzsche -- The high brutality of good intentions -- Henry James's curriculum vitae -- Gertrude Stein and the geography of the sentence -- Go forth and falsify : Katherine Anne Porter and the lies of art -- Three photos of Colette -- Malcolm Lowry -- Rilke's Rodin -- Ezra Pound -- Imaginary Borges and his books -- Invisible cities -- On evil : the ragged core of a sweet apple -- Kinds of killing : the flourishing evil of the Third Reich -- Philosophy and the form of fiction -- The concept of character in fiction -- The medium of fiction -- The baby or the Botticelli -- Simplicities -- The music of prose -- Ive got a little list -- The test of time -- "And" -- The book as a container of consciousness -- The architecture of a sentence -- Carrots, noses, snow, roses, roses -- The soul inside the sentence -- The habitations of the word -- The death of the author.
"A literary delight--a reading feast; a Gassian celebration--the best of the best (in more than fifty selections) from an American master of prose, chosen by Gass himself from his essays, criticism, commentary, short stories, and novels. It begins with his essays, in which Gass looks back at varying points in his writing life at those writers (from Plato, Hobbes and James, to Joyce, Beckett, Stein, and Gaddis) whose work he found inspiring ... and at those whose work he explores and embraces (Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; Stendhal's The Red and the Black). He writes (from A Temple of Texts) on the nature and value of writing ("The true alchemists do not change lead into gold," he writes in "Fifty Literary Pillars," "they change the world into words"). Here is a rich experience of Gass' short fiction: from Eyes, his masterfully crafted novella, "In Camera," about collecting, hording; about suspicions run amok ... from Cartesian Sonata ... and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, 1968, a mythical reimagining of America's heartland. And from his nimble, daredevil novels: Middle C, 2013, the chronicle of an Austrian-born man who, as a child with his mother, relocates to America's Midwest (Woodbine, Ohio), grows up a low-skilled amateur piano player to become a music professor at a small Bible college; his only hobby a fantasy life as the curator of his Inhumanity Museum ... and from The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime"--Michael Silverblatt, The Los Angeles Times). And much more"-- Provided by publisher.
Contents: Tunnel. -- Middle C.

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