I found a good deal of this frustrating and misguided, despite the erudition, polish, and thought that lay behind the pronouncements. Windbag is the word that comes to mind when looking back on these essays. More to come...

Damn status updates. Nearly as bad as reviews.

Francois Camoin recommended b/c it gives great tips on how to characterize characters vividly with concise descriptions.

What is there to say about a book that has brilliance, usually several brilliancies, on every page? My first acquaintance with Gass, this very book (although not this copy) actually, was way back when I was getting my philosophy degree. I was up in the WWU philosophy library, doing research for a paper on the mind-brain problem and its significance to the problem of personal identity (whether we have one—an identity—that is)—reading, specifically, D. M. Armstrong's Bodily Sensations, even more s...

Essays to read during my commute. No way I can handle Finnegans Wake on the bus!April 8, 2010 update: I finished this more quickly than I thought I would and then discovered I could read FW on the bus (with Sunn O))) doom drone blocking out other peoples' cell phone chatter). Gass can do anything he wants to do with the English language; he's a truly extraordinary writer. Like each of his books I own, my copy of Fiction and the Figures of Life is heavily marked up and dogearred, despite some of

"Gass's criticism, in the best tradition of eloquence, wit, and passion, is a defense of 'poesy' in a time of need... Nearly all the essays are a pleasure to read and some—it almost seems shocking to say it—are works of beauty. It has happened before—one thinks of Keat's letters and some fragments of Lawrence—that the unlikely combination of criticism, philosophy and metaphorical inventiveness has resulted in a kind of poetry."— New York Times Book Review"For anyone who writes fiction or writes

First, an admission. Gass’s first collection of essays is lightyears beyond my intellectual level. Switching between heavy philosophical investigations to poetical and opaque literary meditations (by way of book reviews), the essays here lack the same layman’s entrypoint as in later collections Finding a Form or A Temple of Texts—two stronger, more musical and spellbinding books. So my three-star verdict is a partly a reflection on my own shortcomings and partly because Gass has not fully master...

Gass vs. Franzen"In every art two contradictory impulses are in a state of Manichean war; the impulse to communicate and so to treat the medium of communication as a means and the impulse to make an artifact out of the materials and so to treat the medium as an end."William H. Gass, 1970In 2002, much to the consternation of white male American post-modernists, Jonathan Franzen would make a similar distinction between writing models, which enables readers to call writers who prefer one impulse or...

Solid, punchy litcrit; product of a life spent honing aesthetic sensibility. Persuaded me to add Under the Volcano, Sea and Sardinia. Favorite essay: The Case of the Obliging Stranger. Docked a star for reusing the upside down pocket shaking metaphor.Selected quotes"Protective speech must cut off meanings, not take them on. It must find contexts that will limit the functions of its words to that of naming. Gertrude Stein set about discovering such contexts." (90)"[James] merely wrote his novels

An unlikely combination of criticism, philosophy, and metaphorical inventiveness, this book of essays explores fiction as a specific construction: “There are no descriptions in fiction,” Gass states, “there are only constructions”(17) and goes on to say that fiction is “not a reality rendered, but a universe embodied”(53).

If I could I would have every student of the humanities have this book on their reading lists, even if it was just the general essays rather than the specific book reviews (which do contain pearls of wisdom but are largely only of interest to fans of Gass and critics of whichever writer is discussion (excepting the Stein piece which lays out an incisive attack on certain methods of criticism and sets out ideas for how it should be done)). I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what this

Gass is a unique and important voice in Literature, bringing his knowledge and affinity for Philosophy into the context of the art of fiction. His understanding of the craft, particularly language and its functioning process, is vital and thought provoking, best summed in the maxim "There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions."

A little hard to comprehend, but once you do, it is definitely worth the read.

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.

Beautifully written and wise, like all of Gass.

Without a doubt, Gass is much smarter than me. Unfortunately, sometimes this can be as endearing as someone being much better at dropkicking me in the scrotum. Come for the genius writing. Try to stay for the final essay on linguistics. Drink plenty of Powerade in between.

Thought-provoking, philosophical, and also dense.

A word is a concept made fleshLas primera y la última parte del libro son las más interesantes. Las ideas de Gass sobre la ficción, la filosofía versus la literatura (viniendo de un tipo que fue profesor de filosofía casi toda su vida, es doblemente interesante), las distintas digresiones que hace sobre la idea del personaje dentro de la ficción y sobre el medio artístico que es la literatura, el análisis del arte de la cultura popular versus el arte intelectual y, por supuesto, el rol del artis...

William Gass is a critic that reminds us that "critic" as a genre is capable of blending into forms outside itself. He is also philosopher, humorist, fictionist, language adventurer and ardent defender of Gertrude Stein - taking her most brutal critics by name. This is one of those rare writers that teaches the reader how to take an idea and plow forward, and does so in a wonderful prose.

went through this twice. saw somewhere a reviewer called him a giant wind bag. seems fair.