William H Gass Books In Order

Omensetter’s Luck

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter’s Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles through the voices of various participants and observers the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter’s Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil.

The Tunnel

Thirty years in the making, William H. Gass’s second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. It is the story of a middle-aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, sets out to write an introduction. Unable to do so, he finds himself writing about his own life instead, an intensely personal-even private-book that runs counter to the rigidity of his historical work. Isolated, he begins digging a tunnel out of the baseme*nt where he writes.

In this unabridged audio version of The Tunnel, William H. Gass, himself, reads his universally acclaimed novel in its entirety. Formatted as an mp3, the reading fits on three CDs. It includes outtakes, artwork by the author, and twelve Philippics descriptions of the novel’s intention. The Tunnel, already renowned for its singular tone, is given a powerful new voice in this reading.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass s Midwestern dreamers are like the ‘grotesques’ of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce s Dubliners. First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ ‘Mrs. Mean,’ ‘Icicles,’ ‘Order of Insects,’ and the title story.

Cartesian Sonata

In the words of the late Walker Percy, William Gass is a totally committed, totally uncompromising, and extraordinarily gifted writer. His latest work is a suite of four novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God. In the title story, God is a writer in a constant state of fumble, Mind is a housewife modern day Cassandra, and Matter is who else? the helpless and confused husband of Mind. In Bed and Breakfast, the concept of salvation is explored through material possessions a collection of kitsch as a traveling businessman is slowly swamped by the sheer surfeit of matter in a small Illinois town. In Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop s, a young woman growing up in rural Iowa finds herself losing touch with the physical world as she loses herself in the work of her favorite poet. And in The Master of Secret Revenges, God appears in the form of a demon to a young man named Luther, whose progress from devilish youth to satanic manhood is recounted with relish and horror.A profound exploration of good and evil, philosophy and action, marked by the wit and style that has always defined the work of William Gass.

Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. 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.’

Fiction and the Figures of Life

Twenty four essays by the modern master of literary criticism, ranging from discussion of Gertrude Stein and Jorge Luis Borges to Henry James and ‘The Evil Demiurge.’

On Being Blue

BLUE PENCILS, blue noses, blue movies, laws, and stockings. The dumps, mopes, Mondays; the ocean, the sky, and the deep, deep ice. The Whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin. The grass in Kentucky. The china in Grandmother’s pantry. Of all the colors, blue has the widest range of associations, and the widest bandwidth of emotional tints and shades. It is therefore the most suitable color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright and thin or low deep sweet thick dark and soft, blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. This eccentric essay into the ‘world of blue’ is the heart of the heart of Gass s oeuvre.

The World Within the Word

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 Val ry, 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 Habitations of the Word

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 1985 Now a Cornell Paperback ‘These twelve essays take risks, make connections, give off sparks and illustrate Gass’s love of language. Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression…
. Gass writes with impassioned concern.’ Publishers Weekly ‘ These essays are meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass…
. He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they’re unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own.’ Sam Tanenhaus, Village Voice ‘William H. Gass is not alone among…
American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically.’ Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

The Writer in Politics

William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco here present an edited but uncut record of the proceedings of the first international conference convened by the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The topic The Writer in Politics was divided into three parts: politics as material for the writers’ work, politics as a threatening power over the pen, and politics as a viewpoint held by writers. Major addresses were delivered by Breyten Breytenbach, a white South African who was an early critic of apartheid serving seven years in jail before being exiled from his homeland; Nuruddin Farah, the Somali author of a number of internationally recognized novels, who has also suffered exile; Carolyn Forch , an American poet whose experience as a Guggenheim fellow in El Salvador led to her noted second book of poetry, The Country Between Us; Antonio Sk rmeta, the Chilean short story writer, screen writer, and novelist whose Insurrection deals with the Nicaraguan Revolution; Luisa Valenzuela, and Argentine novelist and journalist who fled her home country in 1979 and returned a decade later to find remnants of the former military regime still a legitimate target for her absurdist! prose; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the widely acclaimed Peruvian novelist who founded Libeertad, the political party under whose banner he unsuccessfully ran for president of his country. The Writer in Politics also includes edited transcriptions of the panel discussions that followed each of the six major addresses. Panelists included Eavan Boland, Marc Ch netier, Rbert Coover, Ron Himes, Liu Binyan, Eric Pankey, Anton Shammas, Richard Watson and William Gass.

Finding a Form

Scathing, lyrical, and hilarious by turns, this collection of essays by William H. Gass perhaps our greatest critic and author sounds a rallying cry against the steady encroachment of the banal ‘the Pulitzer Prize in fiction,’ he claims, ‘takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses’ and the lazy on minimalist realism: ‘The advantage to writing this slack is that the writer can’t hang himself with any length of it’ into the fields of fiction. It also provides two of the most dazzling statements of purpose a writer has ever set down about his own art ‘Finding a Form,’ and ‘The Book as a Container of Consciousness’; makes a thorough and entertaining examination of what, exactly, ought to be called ‘avant garde’; examines the work of a number of other great thinker stylists Ford Madox Ford, Robert Walser, Wittgenstein; and provides a concise, playful history of the art of narrative as a whole. An indispensable roadmap to the language that shapes our books and our lives, Finding a Form is a milestone in American letters.

Reading Rilke

The greatly admired essayist, novelist, and philosopher, author of Cartesian Sonata, Finding a Form, and The Tunnel, reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and gives us his own translation of Rilke’s masterwork. After nearly a lifetime of Reading Rilke in English, William Gass undertook the task of translating Rilke’s writing in order to see if he could, in that way, get closer to the work he so deeply admired. With Gass’s own background in philosophy, it seemed natural to begin with the Duino Elegies, the poems in which Rilke’s ideas are most fully expressed and which as a group are important not only as one of the supreme poetic achievements of the West but also because of the way in which they came to be written in a storm of inspiration. Gass examines the genesis of the ideas that inform the Elegies and discusses previous translations. He writes, as well, about Rilke the man: his character, his relationships, his life. Finally, his extraordinary translation of the Duino Elegies offers us the experience of Reading Rilke with a new and fuller understanding.

3 Essays

Cultural Studies. Autobiography. Visual Arts. THREE ESSAYS presents the work of three of America’s most distinguishedwriters Gerald Early, William H. Gass, and Naomi Lebowitz. Each essayoffers the personal experience of the author: Early on growing up in anItalian neighborhood in Philadelphia, Gass on the presence of theMississippi River in the life of a city, and Lebowitz on the memories ofher father, a rabbi. Together with illustrations from three residentartists at Washington University, the writing and visual art combine toform unique reflections on the twentieth century.

Literary St.Louis

Filled with photographs, maps and illustrations, Literary St. Louis features fifty authors who lived and worked in St. Louis. Featured writers are Zo Akins, Sally Benson, Henry Boernstein, Harold Brodkey, William Wells Brown, William Burroughs, Kate Chopin, Winston Churchill, Fannie Cook, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot, Charlotte Stearns Eliot, Stanley Elkin, Eugene Field, Kate Field, John Gardner, Martha Gellhorn, Ulysses S. Grant, Emily Hahn, William Harris, Chester Himes, Fannie Hurst, William Inge, Orrick Johns, Josephone Johnson, Charles Lindbergh, Elijah Lovejoy, Marshall McLuhan, Marianne Moore, Paul Elmer More, John Morris, John Neihardt, Howard Nemerov, Joseph Stanley Pennell, Joseph Pulitzer, William Marion Reedy, Irma Rombauer, Carl Schurz, Shirley Seifert, William T. Sherman, Peter Taylor, Sara Teasdale, Kay Thompson, Mark Twain, Constance Urdang, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe and Patience Worth.

The Writer and Religion

These essays and panel discussions made up The Writer and Religion Conference held at Washington University in St. Louis. The six essays, by writers Eavan Boland, J. M. Coetzee, William Gaddis, Amitav Ghosh, A. G. Mojtabai and Hanan al Shaykh, were followed by panel discussions, with audience participation.

Conversations with William H. Gass

Biography Literary Criticism Conversations with William H. Gass captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America’s most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists. From his first major novel, Omensetter’s Luck 1966, to his numerous collections of essays and philosophical inquiries, to his controversial novel The Tunnel 1995, Gass b. 1924 has proved himself a meticulous craftsman. Throughout these interviews, he reveals an aesthetic that combines ideas from sources as disparate as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, and Plato. The interviews make clear the unity behind Gass’s views is by his own design. Conversations retrace his undergraduate years at Kenyon College and his subsequent philosophical investigation of metaphor at Cornell University. Gass has never strayed from his belief that metaphor is central and fundamental to thought and to aesthetics. In these interviews he reiterates time and again his belief that the ultimate understanding of the relationship of language to the world pivots on one’s understanding of metaphor. In interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers. Revealing how he never shies from an intellectual joust, this collection includes a rousing, contentious debate with John Gardner, fellow literary pundit and fiction writer. The distinction of Gass’s prose is matched by the clarity and brilliance of the mind behind it. These talks allow an unobstructed view. Anyone interested in Gass’s writing will delight in hearing the brutally honest voice of the mind that produced it. Theodore G. Ammon is chair of the philosophy department at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. His work has appeared in such publications as Romance Notes, Arachne, College Mathematics, and the Journal of Aesthetic Education.

A Temple of Texts

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

These twenty five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of healthy dissidents, among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel Garc a M rquez.

In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus A lightning bolt, Gass writes. Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose…
. Ben Jonson s The Alchemist A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade…
Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much…
. Gustave Flaubert s letters Here I learned and learned and learned. And after reading Malory s Le Morte d Arthur, Gass writes I began to eat books like an alien worm.

In the concluding essay, Evil, Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best.
As Gass writes, The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.

A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical.

Life Sentences

A dazzling new collection of essays on reading, writing, form, and thought from one of America’s master writers. It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust. He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved the Nobel Prize winner and Na*zi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust. Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts the sentence. Gass embraces the avant garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts. Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.