Scope and Contents From Publishers Weekly: Gass loves words. His prose is extravagant, lush, sometimes overly florid (as when he talks of Flann O'Brien's death on "the first Fools' Day of April, 1966"), and in this new collection, his words have a tendency to get in the way of his subject matter. Which is a shame, because Gass, a novelist and award-winning critic, writes about books and authors often ignored by mainstream readers: Rabelais, Robert Burton, Elias Canetti. Then again, Gass doesn't write for the mainstream. He is the strangest of academic amalgams: a self-professed lover of the avant-garde as represented by Gertrude Stein, Flann O'Brien and Robert Coover, while at the same time he extols the virtues of what he calls "the classics." His definition of classic is, to be sure, expansive, but he applies an old-fashioned standard to all literature, declaring the need for those classics as the basis for a varied literary diet. Despite the occasional gem, such as a touching, if rambling, tribute...

Scope and Contents

Includes "The Book as Container of Consciousness" which was given as an address at a conference on the book sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. The Sackners were invited to participate in this conference and heard William Gass deliver this poetic essay at the final forum. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Amazon.com A literary event"”the long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by the acclaimed author of The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime.""”Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times; "An extraordinary achievement""”Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetter's Luck ("The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation""”Richard Gilman, The New Republic); Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country ("These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language.""”Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times). Gass's new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life"”futile, comic, anarchic"”arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It...

Scope and Contents This novel deals with self-revelations of an American academic who is trying to write an introduction for a book that he has just completed, "Guilt and Innocence in Hutler's Germany." The book can be opened to almost any page and read as fragments of self-contained poetry. It has many Joycean elements in its presentation.Reviews in Dalkey Archive at their Web site:by H. L. HixWilliam H. Gass's The Tunnel, whatever its virtues, is not an inviting book. Even a reader willing to endure its length and its narrator's unrelenting bitterness must overcome its subordination of plot to other concerns: the book does not proceed from a to b along a "straight line" of narrative or exposition, revealing all relevant information before or as it is needed, but moves in a less ordered (or differently ordered) way that its author conceives as a more accurate replication of human consciousness. Its releasing and withholding information with little regard for plot means that The Tunnel offers more to...

Scope and Contents

This novel deals with self-revelations of an American academic who is trying to write an introduction for a book that he has just completed, "Guilt and Innocence in Hutler's Germany." The book can be opened to almost any page and read as fragments of self-contained poetry. It has many Joycean elements in its presentation. This version of the book has a collaged yellow Jewish star on page 30 with the inscription "JUDE" whereas the purchased version on its release did not. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.