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…

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).

Июньский номер целиком посвящен классику русской и американской литератур ХХ столетия Владимиру Набокову (1899 — 1977) и называется «Сорок лет без Набокова».

Предваряет тематический выпуск статья составителя номера — литературоведа, критика, филолога Н. Г. Мельникова (1970) “В одуряюще сложной перспективе памяти…”. В номере читатель найдет:
выбранные места из деловой переписки Владимира Набокова в переводе Александра Ливерганта и с комментариями Николая Мельникова - поклоннику Набокова предоставляется возможность вжиться в будни большого писателя. В специальный номер включены также три разных перевода «Баллады Лонгвудской долины», более сорока пространных и коротких рецензий видных европейских и американских литераторов на девять книг Владимира Набокова, ранее не публиковавшиеся на русском языке интервью самого великого писателя и воспоминания о нем выдающихся современников.

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.