Последние издания книг Уильяма Гэсса

Признанный классик американского постмодернизма Уильям Гэсс в течение 26 лет работал над монументальной и личной книгой. Её герой, университетский профессор Уильям Колер, завершивший историческое исследование о Холокосте «Вина и невинность в гитлеровской Германии», обнаруживает, что предисловие, которое он пишет, постепенно разрастается в жуткую исповедь о его собственной жизни. Испугавшись, что эти признания прочитает жена, Колер прячет их между страницами своей книги, одновременно начиная рыть в подвале дома лаз, ведущий в никуда... Текст безжалостно погружает читателя в самые глубокие закоулки человеческой души, раскрываясь как…

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).

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."

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 THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners.

First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

It begins in Graz, Austria, in 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father pretends to be Jewish and leaves his country to avoid any connection with the Nazis. In London with his wife and children for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family relocates to a small town in Ohio where Joseph Skizzen grows up and 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 curating an Inhumanity Museum. Skizzen has trained himself to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and Middle C tells the story of his journey--an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves.

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 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 A Temple of Texts come four interrelated novellas that explore good and evil, action and thought, redemption and possession. The reader will encounter here a traveling salesman who gets lost in the kitschy clutter of a small town in Illinois, a young woman in rural Iowa who loses touch with the outside world and turns to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop as anchor, and the coming-of-age story of a devilish young man named Luther (who might as well be called Lucifer). These stories are filled with the familiar style, brilliance, philosophy, and wit that fans of William Gass have come to expect and cherish.

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.

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners.
First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

Tests of Time brings us fourteen witty and elegant essays by novelist and literary critic William H. Gass, "the finest prose stylist in America" (Steven Moore, Washington Post). Whether he's exploring the nature of narrative, the extent and cost of political influences on writers, or the relationships between the stories we tell and the moral judgments we make, Gass is always erudite, entertaining, and enlightening.

Вы полагаете, что "святая троица" современного постмодернизма - Павич, Фаулз и Кундера - стала такой, какой стала, САМА ПО СЕБЕ? Вовсе нет!

Раньше - и гораздо раньше - существовала другая "святая троица", СДЕЛАВШАЯ современный постмодернизм таким, каков он есть теперь. Двух авторов - Барта и Пинчона - российский читатель уже знает. Перед вами - третий. Уильям Гэсс. Абсолютный классик стиля. Абсолютный мастер Слова. Единственный писатель, способный создать нечто, подобное "Картезианской сонате" - сборнику концептуально связанных сюрреалистических новелл-притч, изящно и тонко иллюстрирующих постулаты декартовской философии...

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.

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.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 1985 Now a Cornell Paperback--
"These twelve essays take risks, make connections, give off sparks and illustrate Gass's love of language. Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression. . . . Gass writes with impassioned concern."--Publishers Weekly

"[These] essays [are] meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass. . . . He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they're unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word--they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own."--Sam Tanenhaus, Village Voice

"William H. Gass is not alone among . . . American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically."--Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

A notable novelist and critic considers the works, lives, preoccupations, and achievements of Valery, Freud, Stein, Sartre, Henry Miller, Joyce, Rilke, Proust, Nabokov, Faulkner, Colette, and other modern writers.

Despu?s de su publicaci?n en 1968, En el coraz?n del coraz?n del pa?s se convirti? en un cl?sico de la literatura estadounidense y fue reverenciado por autores como David Foster Wallace y  Cynthia Ozick. Gass demostr? en este libro de relatos que era al mismo tiempo heredero de la prosa de Faulkner y renovador de la narrativa de su pa?s, al igual que sus contempor?neos William Gaddis, John Barth y Robert Coover. Sus tramas est?n situadas en el Medio Oeste, y hablande violencia, soledad, de una especial relaci?n 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 l?mites 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 edici?n: «Escrib? estos relatos sin imaginar que habr?a lectores que los sostendr?an, hoy existen como si carecieran de lectores, aunque a veces alg?n lector deje caer sobre ellos una luz desde ese otro mundo, menos real, de la vida com?n y de las cosas placenteras y cotidianas».