William H. Gass

A finales del siglo XIX, el pueblo de Gilean, en el estado de Ohio, recibe a una familia de forasteros, los Omensetter. Desde el primer momento, sus habitantes admiran la magnética personalidad del cabeza de familia, Brackett, y la suerte que siempre parece acompanarlo. Sin embargo, su llegada no es bien acogida por todos. El reverendo Jethro Furber, en pleno proceso de degradacion mental y espiritual, centra su odio en Brackett Omensetter. Una muerte acelera el enfrentamiento entre los dos hombres, narrado por medio de distintas voces que son testigos fieles de una brillante disquisicion sobre la muerte y el sentido de la vida, sobre el bien y el mal. La suerte de Omensetter fue catalogada desde su publicacion en 1966 como una novela cumbre de la narrativa estadounidense. David Foster Wallace la consideraba una de sus obras favoritas de todos los tiempos, y Susan Sontag siempre recordaba su admiracion por William Gass y por este libro, que describia como perfecto y extraordinario.

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.

Después de su publicación en 1968, En el corazón del corazón del país se convirtió en un clásico de la literatura estadounidense y ha mantenido un cierto aura de libro de culto; un conjunto de relatos que al mismo tiempo es heredero de la prosa de Faulkner y el modernismo de Gertrude Stein, y que renueva la narrativa de su pais junto con la obra de autores como Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, John Barth o Robert Coover. Las dos novelas breves y los tres cuentos que conforman En el corazon del corazon del paiis estan localizados en el Medio Oeste y proporcionan una imagen poderosa y miitica del Estados Unidos mas profundo y real. Hablan de violencia, soledad, de una especial relacion con la naturaleza, y, sobre todo, de la fragilidad del ser humano y de las relaciones que este establece con su entorno. Gass explora y expande los limites del relato, juega con las palabras y las retuerce para alcanzar dimensiones hasta entonces desconocidas en la literatura. Su obra ha sido reverenciada por escritores de la talla de David Foster Wallace o Cynthia Ozick.

On Being Blue is a book about everything bluesex and sleaze and sadness, among other thingsand 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 and 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.

Despues de su publicacion en 1968, En el corazon del corazon del pais se convirtio en un clasico de la literatura estadounidense y ha mantenido un cierto aura de libro de culto; un conjunto de relatos que al mismo tiempo es heredero de la prosa de Faulkner y el modernismo de Gertrude Stein, y que renueva la narrativa de su pais junto con la obra de autores como Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, John Barth o Robert Coover.Las dos novelas breves y los tres cuentos que conforman En el corazon del corazon del pais estan localizados en el Medio Oeste y proporcionan una imagen poderosa y mitica del Estados Unidos mas profundo y real. Hablan de violencia, soledad, de una especial relacion con la naturaleza, y, sobre todo, de la fragilidad del ser humano y de las relaciones que este establece con su entorno. Gass explora y expande los limites del relato, juega con las palabras y las retuerce para alcanzar dimensiones hasta entonces desconocidas en la literatura.Su obra ha sido reverenciada por escritores de la talla de David Foster Wallace o Cynthia Ozick.

A dazzling new collection of essayson reading, writing, form, and thoughtfrom one of Americas master writers. It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gasss 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 Prizewinner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust). Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic partsthe 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 Rilkes Duino Elegies -- and gives us his own translation of Rilkes masterwork.After nearly a lifetime of reading Rilke in English, William Gass undertook the task of translating Rilkes writing in order to see if he could, in that way, get closer to the work he so deeply admired. With Gasss own background in philosophy, it seemed natural to begin with the Duino Elegies, the poems in which Rilkes 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.

From the award-winning author of The Tunnel and Finding a Form--four interrelated novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God. In the first novella, Gass redefines Descartes philosophy. God is a writer in a constant state of fumble. Mind is represented by a housewife who is a modern-day Cassandra. And Matter is, what (and who) else but the helpless and confused husband of Mind. In the novella that follows, the concept of salvation is explored through material possessions--a collection of kitsch--as a traveling businessman is slowly lost in the sheer surfeit of matter in a small Illinois town. In another, Gass explores the minds ability to escape. A young woman growing up in ruralIowa finds herself losing touch with the physical world as she loses herself in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. And in "The Master of Secret Revenges," God appears in the form of Descartes evil demon, Lucifer, as Gass chronicles the life of a young man named Luther and his development from his devilish youth to his demonic adulthood. A profound exploration of good and evil, philosophy and action, filled with the wit and style that have defined the work of William Gass.

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essayshis 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 Garcia Marquez. 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 Wittgensteins 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 Jonsons 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 Flauberts letters (Here I learnedand learnedand learned.) And after reading Malorys Le Morte dArthur, 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.

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

In this sequel to Fiction & the Figures of Life, one of Americas 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 Valery, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner, suicide, "art and order," and the transformation of language into poetry and fiction. The vividness and clarity of Gasss 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 Gasss own singular artistry.

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of Americas 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 Americas 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.

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 literatureand an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to understand how great writing works.

A literary eventthe long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by the acclaimed author of The Tunnel (The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime.Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times; An extraordinary achievementMichael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetters Luck (The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generationRichard Gilman, The New Republic); Willie Masters Lonesome Wife; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language.Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times).Gasss new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a lifefutile, comic, anarchicarranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzens father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up, becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy selfa professor with a fantasy goal: to establish the Inhumanity Museum . . . as Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless.Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another.William Gass set out to write a novel that breaks traditional rules and denies itself easy solutions, cliff-edge suspense, and conventional surprises . . . Middle C is that book; a masterpiece by a beloved master.

A dazzling new collectiontwo novellas and four short stories from one of the most revered writers of our time, author of seven books of fiction, among them The Tunnel (An extraordinary achievementMichael Dirda, The Washington Post); Middle C (Exhilaratingly ingeniousCynthia Ozick, TheNew York Times Book Review, cover); and Cartesian Sonata (The finest prose stylist in AmericaThe Washington Post). It begins with "In Camera," the first of the two novellas, and tells the story, which grows darker and dustier by the speck, of a Mr. Gab (who doesnt have the gift) and his photography shop (in a part of town so drab even robbers wouldnt visit), a shop stuffed with gray-white, gray-bleach photographs, each in its own cellophane sheet, loosely side-filed in cardboard boxes, tag attached . . . an inner sanctum where little happens beyond the fulsome, deep reverence for Mr. Gabs images and vast collection, a homemade museum in the midst of the outer maelstrom . . . until a Mr. Stu (as in u-stew-pid) enters the shop, inspecting the extraordinary collection, and Mr. Gabs treasure-filled, dust-laden, meticulously contained universe begins to implode . . . In the story Dont Even Try, Sam, the upright piano from the 1942 Warner Bros. classic Casablanca is interviewed (I know why you want to talk to me, the piano says. Its because everybody else is dead. Stars go out. Directors die. Companies fold. But some of the props get preserved. Ive seen my friend the Vichy water bottle in the storeroom as wrapped up as the Maltese Falcon. Wed fetch a price now) . . . In another story, Charity, a young lawyer, whose business it is to keep hospital equipment honestly produced, offers a simple gift and is brought to the ambiguous heart of charity itself. In Soliloquy for a Chair, a folding chair does just thattalks in a barbershop that is ultimately bombed . . . and in The Toy Chest, Disneylike creatures take on human roles and concerns and live in an atmosphere of a childs imagination.An enchanting Gassian journey; a glorious fantasia; a virtuoso delight.

Después de su publicación en 1968, En el corazón del corazón del país se convirtió en un clásico de la literatura estadounidense y fue reverenciado por autores como David Foster Wallace y Cynthia Ozick. Gass demostro en este libro de relatos que era al mismo tiempo heredero de la prosa de Faulkner y renovador de la narrativa de su pais, al igual que sus contemporaneos William Gaddis, John Barth y Robert Coover. Sus tramas estan situadas en el Medio Oeste, y hablande violencia, soledad, de una especial relacion con la naturaleza y, sobre todo, de la fragilidad del hombre y de las relaciones que este establece con su entorno. Gass explora y expande los limites de la narrativa, juega con las palabras, las retuerce y adentra al lector en dimensiones desconocidas hasta entonces en la literatura.Afirma Gass en el prefacio incluido en esta nueva edicion: "Escribi estos relatos sin imaginar que habria lectores que los sostendrian, hoy existen como si carecieran de lectores, aunque a veces algun lector deje caer sobre ellos una luz desde ese otro mundo, menos real, de la vida comun y de las cosas placenteras y cotidianas".

El cielo, los cuadros de Yves Klein, los jeans, la lengua de la jirafa, la mirada de un escandinavo, la sangre noble, el terciopelo de la película de David Lynch o las venas bajo la piel. Los límites del azul van mas alla de lo que nuestros ojos ven, de lo que nuestra imaginacion pueda idear. Porque el azul no es tan solo un color, es tambien un estado de animo, una forma de ser y la excusa idonea que encontro William Gass para reflexionar acerca de los sentidos que atribuimos a las palabras. Sobre lo azul es un ensayo atipico en el que Gass analiza los matices del azul, no solo como color, sino en tanto palabra, y mas alla de lo semantico. Por el camino, el lector se vera inmerso en los laberintos gassianos, entre las distintas acepciones que puede adquirir la palabra joder, la mejor forma de narrar una escena sexual o las diversas ideas que desde la filosofia se han propuesto para la percepcion del color. Una leccion de escritura y una reflexion sobre el lenguaje y sus posibilidades.

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 literatureand an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to understand how great writing works.