I feel as though only giving this 4 stars is an act of betrayal: I love William H. Gass. A lot. Perhaps having started with his fiction first has put this collection at a disadvantage. It is still great, but I found myself lost far too often: lost in the metaphors, missing the links. More so in the middle, though. Either way, I'd recommend Gass to anyone: at his best he is *the* best, at his worst, still better than most.

I think I appreciated this essay collection more than his others, because I've read much from the writers whose work Gass often cites (Lowry, Porter, Nietzsche), and because I've lived through a few hundred books and had years of my own life experience since first encountering his work in the late 2000s. When Gass is great, he's the best, dazzling the mind with original metaphors and one's tongue with prose/song-sentences. But when he's off, or he's cranky, he's simply a pain in the ass. His con...

I think my favorite was "A Fiesta for the Form." I also think I wanted to like this book more than I actually did.

An excellent collection of essays. Particularly, "Autobiography," "The Language of Being and Dying," and "The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde" struck me. But there's a lot here for poets as well as linguists and philosophers. A well rounded collection.

Gass is my new loverboy. You can have near nonagenarian loverboys, right? In ‘Pulitzer: The People’s Prize’ Gass performs sober seppuku upon this embarrassing quasi-literary, crowd-pleasing “prize,” bestowed upon nonbooks no one can remember a month later. ‘A Failing Grade for the Present Tense’ explores the popularity of this limited tense choice among creative writing students, and offers suggestions as to more multifarious tenses for those trapped in the terminal now. ‘Finding a Form’ and ‘A

This National Book Critics Circle Award winner, finds Herr Gass, in top form. These nineteen essays, divided into five sections, offer the readers a cornucopia of delight.Plenty to chew on here– thoughts on the music of prose, on language, nature, culture and cosmos, art and morality, the avant-garde, autobiography, simplicities, etc, etc. Well, well, my cup of joy runneth over!There are many things Gass doesn't like:—Pulitzer Prize & others of its ilk. Do I hear a cynical aside: Oh, but what ab...

At his very best, Gass writes glorious, dialectical sentences, paragraphs and pages, as in his hatchet job on critics and authors who support the Pulitzer, and prizes in general: "The panel will be formed with the same unfailing dimsight its members will feel obliged to display... each will be implicitly asked to represent their region, race or sex... the only qualification a judge ought to have is unimpeachable good taste, which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile pluralistic concerns a...

At the beach bookstore, among tattered copies of James Patterson and Nora Roberts novels, I was shocked to find a lovely hardcover copy of this. Best $4 spent in a long time.

nicely written collection of essays. i particularly enjoyed the ones on ezra pound, the pulitzer prize, and the present tense.

Gass doesn't believe in an eternity, and he doesn't like movies, so he would never quote, if he even knows, Gladiator's tag, "What we do in life echoes in eternity," but he might concede the inverse, "What we believe about eternity echoes in life," as his belief in nothing beyond this life yields, in his criticism, an insistence on form as the best guarantee of immortality. Write and write well, because it's all of you that will remain once you're dead.

Gass, master puppeteer of the English language, animates the Word in essays so alive one strains to see the strings yet sees them not.

Acerbic and pretentious, though of course he has some insights, trapped somewhere in the midst of profoundly tedious wordplay --- for example, did you know that Ezra Pound's last name is an English word ("pound") with multiple meanings, none of which bear any relevance to his life or work? Well, don't worry, Professor Gass is here to tell you all about it! In general, these essays made me wonder if the narrator of The Tunnel is semi-autobiographical? Gass is an unpleasant person, and it makes se...

Read a few of the key essays and skipped around some. Gass is good here, but I prefer his fiction. His books on literature are all the same, basically.

I'm really glad that the fiction of Gass' I've read got me interested enough in reading his essays, because this collection is fantastic. I was definitely not expecting the level of philosophical erudition presented here; Gass' writing is unbelievably well-informed. He shines the brightest, however, when writing about writers and writing; the last three essays in the collection are a head or two above the rest, in my opinion.

I skimmed a few of these, skipped a couple, and really enjoyed a few. The title essay did it for me, and I also liked "Ezra Pound" (which made me feel like less of a philistine for my early impressions of the guy many years ago), "Simplicities," and "The Music of Prose."

This is short because the question about the reading of Gass's essays is a question which goes without saying; has been decided beforehand. His are the best damn essays. Period. And double the pleasure for us readers of fiction that so many of his essays are about literature and its reading and its writing. This collection in particular should be at the top of the queue for anyone and everyone interested in the ontology of words and books.There's that word, ontology. What I love about Gass, what...

ويليام جاس أحد أمهر الكتاب الأمريكين روائيا وناقدا في النصف الثاني من القرن العشرين. قد تتفق أو تختلف معه. قد تستفزك أحيانا نبرته الأكاديمية المتعالية التي تفترض نوعا من التفوق الأخلاقي إن جاز التعبير، الشعرية المبالغ فيها في كتب مثل "أن تكون حزينا/أزرقا". ولكن سيبهرك دائما بوضوح أفكاره، بدقته. أعماله منحوتة نحتا دائما، لا مكان لنتوءات أو نشاز فيها. عمل نقدي جدير بالقراءة. وإن كنت أختلف مع عدد ليس قليلا مما جاء فيه.

"the classic course of the disease that arises from the continued sufferance of social disdain and unconcern: how it begins in this or that specific instance of rejection; how the poet starts to glory in the fact of it, to form his very self in terms of such an image; how he augments the facts by acting within that definition and earning further and confirming slights; and finally, how a theoretical raison de'être arrives, after the fact, indeed, but in time to justify one's hostility as a perfe...

Sheets of showy language, which is fitting since these essays are testimonies to Gass' love - if that is the word - of the written word. Imposing; only some will feel worthy after reading and we will have to wonder about them. Still, though I finished the book unconvinced that linguistic precision is the life-and-death matter that is shaped here, I found a lot to admire in his rigorous approach. No wonder it takes him 17 years to write a novel. All of the essays were thought provoking, but I pro...

If you want to study literary form then read William Gass. He is the master. His writing isn't about the topic, it is about the form. This book is a master work in example. He starts an essay on Ezra Pound like this: It is too easy, the name game - in this case. .... If used as a verb pound means to beat, if used as a noun it is a weight. You get the idea.