William Gass writes about literary language, about history, about the avant-garde, about minimalism's brief vogue, about the use of the present tense in fiction (Is it due to the lack of both a sense of history and a belief in the future?), about biography as a form, about exile - spiritual and geographical - and he examines the relationship of the writer's life to the writer's work. With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.

Reviews
"Reading these essays is like watching a glass blower at work over the flame, seeing his forms emerge-at times amusing trinkets, at times vessels of beauty and purpose... The vases of Mr. Gass's making (something like extruded golden bowls with nearly undetectable flaws) would be in such a thoughtful essay as 'The Story of the State of Nature,' in which he mounts, in clear expository fashion, an entire history of narrative."-Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review "Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page... These pieces deal with Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in relation to their thought; various species of the avant-garde from Pierre de Ronsard to Degas, Beckett and the Bauhaus; the exacting demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's 'banal and hokey' choices in fiction; and the abyss between the moral viewpoints expressed in works of art and the lives of their creators. Gass's deeply felt essays ... are quotable, flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "These essays showcase precision intellectual workmanship, displaying intricate multifaceted models of how writing and thinking relate to life."-Kirkus Reviews


Awards
Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards 1996.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801484896
Author William H. Gass
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 21mm