WILLIAM H. GASS (1924-2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He typically devoted enormous attention to sentence construction, and his prose has been variously described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. In an interview, Gass commented on the subject of his genre and form-defying works, laughing off the title "Postmodern," and coining himself "Late" or "Decayed Modern".
His first novel, OMENSETTER'S LUCK (1966), about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was praised by critics for its linguistic virtuosity. Richard Gilman in The New Republic called it "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." In 1968 he published IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love.
THE TUNNEL (1995) was variously received as an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece" (Robert Kelly) and "a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century" (Steven Moore). Michael Silverblatt of the L.A. Times wrote in his review of the novel: "A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4½ times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition."
In the novel MIDDLE C (2013), Gass presents a man’s life -- futile, comic, anarchic -- arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms, and tones, with music as both theme and structure. Joseph Skizzen leads a resolutely ordinary life but one that is built on a scaffold of forgery and deceit. MIDDLE C tells the story of his journey, a story that is also an investigation into the nature of identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves.
His collections of criticism include THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD (1978), which considers the work of Freud, Sartre, Joyce, Rilke, Proust, Nabokov, Faulkner, and other modern writers. ON BEING BLUE (1991) is an improvisational inquiry into the nature of words and consciousness, using as its departure point the concept of the color blue -- the idea of blue, the state of blue, the uses of blue . . . the bluenesses of blue. In READING RILKE (1999), Gass reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies", providing his own translation of Rilke's masterwork. A TEMPLE OF TEXTS (2006) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and both FINDING A FORM (1996) and TESTS OF TIME (2002) received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:
== FICTION ==
* Cartesian Sonata & Other Novellas (Knopf, 1998)
* Eyes: Novellas & Short Stories (Knopf, 2015)
* In the Heart of the Country & Other Stories (NYRB, 2015)
* Middle C (Knopf, 2013)
* Omensetter's Luck (Signet, 1967 / Penguin, 1997) -- PDF + ePUB
* Tunnel, The (Knopf, 1995)
== NON-FICTION ==
* Fiction and the Figures of Life (Vintage, 1972) -- PDF
* Finding a Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)
* Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Knopf, 2012)
* On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Godine, 1991 / NYRB, 2014) -- PDF + ePUB
* Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation (Knopf, 1999)
* Temple of Texts, A (Knopf, 2006)
* Tests of Time: Essays (Chicago, 2003) -- PDF
* World Within the Word, The: Essays (Knopf, 1978)
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