William H. Gass – författare

"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New RepublicNow celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories.Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his 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 García Márquez. 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 Wittgenstein’s 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 Jonson’s 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 Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, 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 Hardcover edition.

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

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.

A literary event—the 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 achievement”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetter’s Luck (“The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation”—Richard 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).Gass’s 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 life—futile, comic, anarchic—arranged 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 Skizzen''s 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 self—a 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.

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.

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 mind''s 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.

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 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 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.

A dazzling new collection—two 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 achievement”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Middle C (“Exhilaratingly ingenious”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review, cover); and Cartesian Sonata (“The finest prose stylist in America”—The 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 doesn’t have the gift) and his photography shop (in a part of town so drab even robbers wouldn’t 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. Gab’s 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. Gab’s treasure-filled, dust-laden, meticulously contained universe begins to implode . . . In the story “Don’t 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. “It’s because everybody else is dead. Stars go out. Directors die. Companies fold. But some of the props get preserved. I’ve seen my friend the Vichy water bottle in the storeroom as wrapped up as the Maltese Falcon. We’d 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 that—talks 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 child’s imagination.An enchanting Gassian journey; a glorious fantasia; a virtuoso delight.

From the Hardcover edition.

A literary delight--a reading feast; a Gassian celebration--the best of the best: more than fifty selections chosen by Gass himself from his essays, criticism, commentary, short stories, and novels.It begins with his essays, in which Gass looks back at varying points in his writing life at those writers (from Plato, Hobbes, and James, to Joyce, Beckett, Stein, and Gaddis) whose work he found inspiring . . . and at those whose work he explores and embraces (Laurence Sterne''s Tristram Shandy; Ford Madox Ford''s Parade''s End; Thomas Mann''s The Magic Mountain; Stendhal''s The Red and the Black). He writes (from A Temple of Texts) on the nature and value of writing ("The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words").     Here is a rich experience of Gass''s short fiction: from Eyes, his masterfully crafted novella, "In Camera," about collecting, hording; about suspicions run amok . . . from Cartesian Sonata . . . and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a mythical reimagining of America''s heartland.     And from his nimble, daredevil novels: Middle C (2013), the chronicle of an Austrian-born man who, as a child with his mother, relocates to America''s Midwest (Woodbine, Ohio), grows up a low-skilled amateur piano player to become a music professor at a small Bible college; his only hobby a fantasy life as the curator of his Inhumanity Museum . . . and from The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime" --Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times).

Conversations with William H. Gass captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America's most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists.From his first major novel, Omensetter's Luck (1966), to his numerous collections of essays and philosophical inquiries, to his controversial novel The Tunnel (1995), Gass (b. 1924) has proved himself a meticulous craftsman. Throughout these interviews, he reveals an aesthetic that combines ideas from sources as disparate as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, and Plato.The interviews make clear the unity behind Gass's views is by his own design. Conversations retrace his undergraduate years at Kenyon College and his subsequent philosophical investigation of metaphor at Cornell University.Gass has never strayed from his belief that metaphor is central and fundamental to thought and to aesthetics. In these interviews he reiterates time and again his belief that the ultimate understanding of the relationship of language to the world pivots on one's understanding of metaphor.n interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers. Revealing how he never shies from an intellectual joust, this collection includes a rousing, contentious debate with John Gardner, fellow literary pundit and fiction writer.The distinction of Gass's prose is matched by the clarity and brilliance of the mind behind it. These talks allow an unobstructed view. Anyone interested in Gass's writing will delight in hearing the brutally honest voice of the mind that produced it.

Dies ist das herausragende literarische Opus von einem der großen Autoren seiner Generation. Ein grandioser Bildungsroman mit musikalischer Grundierung und das kunstvoll komponierte Porträt eines Angepassten, mit weiten Ausflügen in Politik, Historie, Soziologie, Psychologie und, nicht zuletzt, in die jüngere Musikgeschichte, von Schönberg bis Cage.Die Mittellage ist das eingestrichene C auf dem Klavier, und der mittelmäßige Pianist Joey Skizzen kann es nicht spielen, weil auf seinem Instrument die Taste kaputt ist. Skizzen ist ein kleiner, skurriler Assistenzprofessor für Musik an einer unbedeutenden Universität im Mittleren Westen der USA - erklärter Hypokrit und Menschenfeind, ein Ge- und Vertriebener des Jahrhunderts, dem er angehört: Sein katholischer Vater floh vor den Nazis aus Österreich, indem er sich als Jude ausgab, und ließ die Familie dann in London sitzen. Mit Mutter und Schwester emigriert Skizzen in den streng protestantischen amerikanischen Bible Belt, wo er seinerseits das Leben eines Hochstaplers führt, um seiner verhassten Durchschnittlichkeit Glanzlichter aufzusetzen. Er gibt sich als Schönberg-Spezialist aus und lügt erfolgreich über seine Ausbildung und Vergangenheit. Zu Hause richtet er, wenn er nicht gerade Dosen in eine Tonne an der Wand tritt, auf dem Dachboden ein «Museum der Unmenschlichkeit» ein, sammelt Zeitungsartikel und Gräuelbilder. Seine Angst, die Menschheit werde vielleicht nicht überleben, ist längst von der Angst abgelöst worden, sie könnte bestehen bleiben …

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 demostró en este libro de relatos que era al mismo tiempo heredero de la prosa de Faulkner y renovador de la narrativa de su país, al igual que sus contemporáneos William Gaddis, John Barth y Robert Coover.  Sus tramas están situadas en el Medio Oeste, y hablande violencia, soledad, de una especial relación 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 límites 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 edición: "Escribí estos relatos sin imaginar que habría lectores que los sostendrían, hoy existen como si carecieran de lectores, aunque a veces algún lector deje caer sobre ellos una luz desde ese otro mundo, menos real, de la vida común 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 más allá de lo que nuestros ojos ven, de lo que nuestra imaginación pueda idear. Porque el azul no es tan solo un color, es también un estado de ánimo, una forma de ser y la excusa idónea que encontró William Gass para reflexionar acerca de los sentidos que atribuimos a las palabras.   Sobre lo azul es un ensayo atípico en el que Gass analiza los matices del azul, no solo como color, sino en tanto palabra, y más allá de lo semántico. Por el camino, el lector se verá 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 filosofía se han propuesto para la percepción del color. Una lección de escritura y una reflexión sobre el lenguaje y sus posibilidades.

»I hjärtat av hjärtat av landet« är en novell av William H. Gass, först publicerad som titelnovell i en samling 1968. På ytan är det en berättelse om livet i en amerikansk småstad med sin storhetstid bakom sig, full av minnen från tiden när allt var möjligt. Samtidigt kan man utläsa en kommentar om själva språkets begränsningar. Huvudpersonen försöker katalogisera sina upplevelser i staden för att på så sätt återfå sin barndoms intensiva intryck, men misslyckas med att överbrygga gapet mellan språk och verklighet. I översättning av Claes-Göran Holmberg. WILLIAM H. GASS [1924-2017] var en amerikansk författare, kritiker och filosofiprofessor. Hans flerfaldigt prisbelönta verk karakteriseras av hård, fyndig prosa och han menade att en drivande faktor till hans skrivande var ilska från sin uppväxt. Han är mest känd för romanerna The Tunnel och Middle C.

In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this “essay-novella” which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, “the lonesome lady of the book’s title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text.”