I am pleased to have discovered this author. I enjoyed the reviews and essays presented. I also got to know a little bit more about authors I've read (Malcolm Lowery, Faulkner and Nabokov) and some I have never read. I enjoyed Gass' writing style and would like to read one of his novels.

Essays about authors that committed suicide, drunkenness with a particular focus on Malcolm Lowry, Freud, sex, and sentence structure. While I love Gass' short stories and enjoyed his recent novel, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with these essays.

Not a lot of people who are born in Fargo, North Dakota grow up to be dazzlers. I'm guessing. William H. Gass is American literature's preeminent dazzler, and he was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He starts but doesn't, contrary to how it may appear to some, end the dazzling at the level of the sentence. Sure, he is the finest sentence writer maybe ever. His sentences are the ripest fruit on the market. They are not always perfect, but they are always a meal. Sometimes they do too much. An occasio...

::: review gestating :::

Great critic.

Imagine being the editor of a respectable literary publication (if it helps, quote FR Leavis and take up chronic alcoholism) and receiving a book review from William H. Gass. Not only has he written the best review of a marginal publication unworthy of his masterly talents that no mortal will ever read, he has also written a scholarly essay bursting with philosophical insight, twenty pages of sumptuous pedantic analysis, and a wonderfully rich encapsulation of the author whose work is being disc...

There are only three kinds of Gass essay, and perhaps a fourth could be placed between the first two if you like for those cases where you can’t quite decide. There are, in the first place, those essays in which he covers a topic of earnest interest to you the individual reader with your own particular agendas and orientations (Stein, Lowry, Faulkner, Colette, Proust, Nabokov, Freud with a dash of Burton) and there are those occasional essays in which he deals with stuff you either don’t give a

Honestly, these essays mostly about writers whom I assume Gass admired, soared unreachable (to me) above and beyond my ken. I gathered bits/pieces of what he (I think) was driving at, but alas no coalescing synergy prevailed. So, how should (I) this book find a home with other readers with whom may derive meaning/value commensurate with time/effort invested in reading? I don't know. I'm giving a four star rating because I suspect it's at least that good for those who WOULD know. Humph, exasperat...

Having recently been blown away by his novel Omensetter's Luck, I thought I'd try some of his non-fiction. This collection of essays was really impressive, with the highlights for me being 'Malcolm Lowry' (not long back read his novel 'Under the Volcano'), 'Wisconsin Death Trip', 'Sartre on Theater', and 'Groping for Trouts'. After just two books, I'm now starting to see why William H. Gass is regarded by some as one of the great American writers - but one who tends to go under the radar.

Oh, the indulgence. As it seems no one is/was completely immune to the pervasive and self-aggrandizing monstrosity that is postmodernism, not even masters from Gass's echelon. Just like Barnes with his Flaubert, this is a stylistic itch, an au courant hype so tempting, that everybody and their cousin wanted to prove their mettle in it, show that they can nail it, even mockingly, while adding a dash of their own. Trouble is, the results are invariantly dated and that little original dash gets abs...

"The World Within The Mind"Phew, finally finished, to use the author's favourite and tiresome stylistic technique.True, the essays on the works by Stein, Nabokov or Lowry are written with wit and can be read with fun.But the ones on philosophy... Well, it seems the author builds his own world, using heavy bricks such as Ideas, Digressions, Metaphors, Enumerations, walls himself in and refuses to let too many readers inside.I've tried to find a window in the wall to enter but failed. Have you?

William H. Gass writes:During the decline of Christian moralism few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society [as the suicide has.] It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue. To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide wa...

Gass's stylistic tics can sometimes be annoying, all too alliterative and allusive, alarming... stringing together words like he is aimlessly shuffling an abacus. Fortunately, this abacus does produce sums, and everything flows very nicely, making this collection of reviews (mostly taken from the New York Review of Books) extremely easy and pleasant to read without sacrificing sense and depth. His essay on Stein, in particular, is wonderful (and loooong, but not without cause, and never does it

not as brain expanding as fiction and the figures and the life but gass still writes the good write, glad to finally resume my completion effort

3. "We could try to start clean. Suppose, we as composers, we had to work with hydraulic sighs and door squeaks, warning whistles, temple bells, and warhoops. WE should have, first of all to snip these unruly noises from their sources (we hear a stealthy footfall in the floor's creak), then remove them from any meanings they might have been assigned (fire, four o''clock, beep beep, watch out!) otherwise we wouldn't be composing music but sound effects."

I'd recommend his essay on Gertrude Stein, simply to understand her method and some of its motivations, both in the social milieu and in her biography. (William Carlos Williams' essay on Stein is also instructive, albeit shorter.) I'd also recommend his essay on Malcolm Lowry as a reliable window to his principal works, both Volcano and his posthumous books. Gass tends to take an eclectic approach, disinclined as he seems to be with theory.His prose is cerebral as well as vibrant and tetchy, occ...

(3.7/5.0) A few killers in here--the final essay mesmerizes. But, honestly, little Billy Gass is just too bright for his own good. Some of these, with their intense erudition, verge on unreadable status (Malcolm Lowry-- I'm looking perplexedly at you); still, as always with W.H., the language justifies the labor.

Best.

need some time to fully comprehend his intention.