William H. Gass Book order

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.

The point where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface is known as an eye. It is a place of mystery, where dry ground becomes soaked with life-giving water, and nature gives us a glimpse of all that happens out of the realm of human vision. So begins William Gass’s latest collection, with these evocative lines from Jan DeBlieu. What follows are six extraordinary works of fiction: stories and novellas that capture these moments of mystery and explore the hidden philosophical depths of everyday life as only Gass can. “Charity” examines the roles of asking, giving, and receiving through the prism of a young lawyer who offers a simple gift. “In Camera” takes us into a photography shop owner’s incomparable collection of images. “Don’t Even Try, Sam” gives us the voice of the prop piano from Casablanca, and “Soliloquy for a Chair” is narrated by a folding chair in a barbershop that is ultimately fated for destruction. Incisive, darkly funny, formally innovative and linguistically stunning, Eyes is a tour de force of modern fiction.

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. Gass writes: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

In a series of brilliant variations, William 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. It begins in Graz, Austria, in 1938, when Joseph Skizzen’s father pretends to be Jewish and emigrates to avoid the Nazis. In London with his wife and children for the duration of the war, he mysteriously disappears and the rest of the family relocates to a small town in Ohio. Here Joseph Skizzen grows up and leads a resolutely ordinary life, but one that is built on a scaffold of forgery and deceit. Outwardly he is a professor of music at a mediocre college; secretly he is the earnestly obsessive curator of a private Inhumanity Museum, meant to contain the guilt of centuries of atrocities. 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.

The author emphasizes the profound connection between language and creativity, asserting that a writer's primary duty lies in honoring both. This perspective highlights the importance of linguistic integrity and the creative process, suggesting that true artistry emerges from a deep respect for words and their potential. The focus on craftsmanship invites readers to appreciate the nuances of writing and the commitment required to produce meaningful work.

Wyatt Gwyon forges art not from larceny but from love. He produces uncannily accurate "originals", faithful to the spirit and the letter of the Flemish masters. In an age when the real and the fake have become indistinguishable, Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot even recognize.

The renowned essayinst, philosopher, and novelist presents a close-up study and rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetic masterpiece Duino Elegies as he reflects on the art of translating a work from another language while maintaining the true essence of the original. 15,000 first printing.

Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

Brackett Omensetter arrives, with his wife, family and belongings in the rural American town of Gilean. It swiftly becomes apparent that he is someone out of the ordinary, as he sets off a ground swell of violent emotions in the once tranquil commmunity. Who is he? What does he represent?