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 Nazi 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.

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...

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.

From the author of The Tunnel comes a new collection of essays, his first in eight years, on art, writing, nature and culture. This book is by one of the most important and briliant thinkers at work today.

This small but memorable treatise, written "for all who live in the country of the blue," examines the color as state of mind, as Platonic Ideal, as a notoriously erotic hue, and as a color of our interior life. In a brilliant, extended meditation, Gass mulls over blue in literature and art, dance, music, and the popular press. No shade or variation escapes his engaged and engaging prose or his vertiginous asides. This is a witty, lyrical, highly original, and beautifully written book that demands to be read and redefines the meaning of a "philosophical inquiry." "Not since Herman Melville pondered the whiteness of Moby Dick has a region of the spectrum been subjected to such eclectic scrutiny. . . Gass gives philosophy back its good old name as a feast that can never sate the mind."—Time

Enter the sublime, upside-down / inside-out world of William H. Gass . . . in this case where the Eyes have it every which way, including up . . . in a dazzling new collection of novellas and stories (six in all) from one of the most revered writers of our time, author of sixteen books, among them, the universally acclaimed The Tunnel ("An extraordinary achievement"--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Middle C("Exhilaratingly ingenious"--Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review cover); and Life Sentences ("A literary miracle"--The New York Observer).This enchanting, Gassian journey begins with "In Camera," an investigation into what is likely to develop when a possibly illicit collection of photographs becomes the object of a greedy salesman's loving eyes . . . In "Charity," a young lawyer, whose business it is to keep hospital equipment honestly produced, offers a simple gift and is brought to the ambiguous...