Download or read book Willie Masters Lonesome Wife written by William H. Gass and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."
Download or read book Willie Masters Lonesome Wife written by William H. Gass and published by Commonwealth Secretariat. This book was released on 1989 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."
Download or read book Willie Masters Lonesome Wife written by William H. Gass and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Middle C written by William H. Gass and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Skizzen's family fled from Austria in 1938 to London where his father disappeared, he and his family then relocated to small town Ohio and Joseph grows up to be a decent piano player with a deeply fractured sense of identity.
Download or read book Omensetter s Luck written by William H. Gass and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1997-04-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories. 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. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book The Tunnel written by William H. Gass and published by Commonwealth Secretariat. This book was released on 1999 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gass has produced a book that burrows inside us then wails like a beast, a book that mainlines a century's terror direct to the brain."--Voice Literary Supplement
Download or read book Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas written by William H. Gass and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Temple of Texts written by William H. Gass and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Writer in Politics written by William H. Gass and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six essays and panel transcriptions from The Writer in Politics conference, Washington University, October, 1992, featuring writers describing their place in the political arena. The presenters have "walked the walk" and include Mario Vargas Llosa, Luisa Valenzuela, Nuruddin Farah, and Carolyn Forche who collectively have run for political office, been exiled, jailed, or active as witnesses in a political life. Their insights are a fascinating examination of the role writers play can play as critics, resistors, and contributors to a society's evolution. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Tests of Time written by William H. Gass and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-06-16 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The William H Gass Reader written by William H. Gass and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his career, William Gass relentlessly pushed at the boundaries of language, celebrating the music of the sentence and the aesthetics of the written word. Now, the best and most important of his work is collected in one volume. There are essays on Plato, Hobbes, James, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Gaddis, Sterne, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Mann. There are pieces that examine the inner workings of writing. There is his masterful short fiction, from the perfectly crafted novella “In Camera” to the mythical “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” And there are excerpts from his novels, including his magnum opus, The Tunnel. Taken together, this collection is a peerless, essential celebration of literature—and an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to understand how great writing works.
Download or read book Fiction and the Figures of Life written by William H. Gass and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1971 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by William H. Gass.
Download or read book On Being Blue written by William H. Gass and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 and 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.
Download or read book Mulligan Stew written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists -- as Hugh Kenner in Harper's wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.
Download or read book To Pixar and Beyond written by Lawrence Levy and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A delightful book about the creation of Pixar from the inside . . . and like a good Pixar film, it’ll put a smile on your face.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times Winner, Axiom Business Book Award * Fortune Favorite Books of the Year Top Pick * Amazon Best Book of the Year in Business & Leadership After he was dismissed from Apple in the early 1990s, Steve Jobs turned his attention to a little-known graphics company he owned called Pixar. One day, out of the blue, Jobs called Lawrence Levy, a Harvard-trained lawyer and executive with whom he’d never spoken before. He hoped to persuade Levy to help him pull Pixar back from the brink of failure. This is the extraordinary story of what happened next: how Jobs and Levy concocted and pulled off a highly improbable plan that transformed Pixar into the Hollywood powerhouse it is today. Levy offers a masterful firsthand account of how Pixar rose from humble beginnings, what it was like to work so closely with Jobs, and how Pixar’s story offers profound lessons that can apply to our professional and personal lives. To Pixar and Beyond reveals how a struggling computer animation company became one of the greatest entertainment studios of all time. “[A] delightful book about finance, creative genius, workplace harmony, and luck.” —Fortune “Part business book and part thriller—a tale that’s every bit as compelling as the ones Pixar tells in its blockbuster movies.” —Dan Lyons, bestselling author of Disrupted “A natural storyteller . . . an inside look at the business and a fresh, sympathetic view of Jobs.” —Success Magazine
Download or read book Finding a Form written by William H. Gass and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Tunnel comes a new collection of essays, his first in eight years, on art, writing, nature and culture. This book is by one of the most important and briliant thinkers at work today.
Download or read book The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media written by Werner Wolf and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One possible description of the contemporary medial landscape in Western culture is that it has gone ‘meta’ to an unprecedented extent, so that a remarkable ‘meta-culture’ has emerged. Indeed, ‘metareference’, i.e. self-reflexive comments on, or references to, various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact or performance, specific media and arts or the media in general is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in ‘high’ art and literature as frequently as in their popular counterparts, in the traditional media as well as in new media. From the Simpsons, pop music, children’s literature, computer games and pornography to the contemporary visual arts, feature film, postmodern fiction, drama and even architecture – everywhere one can find metareferential explorations, comments on or criticism of representation, medial conventions or modes of production and reception, and related issues.Within individual media and genres, notably in research on postmodernist metafiction, this outspoken tendency towards ‘metaization’ is known well enough, and various reasons have been given for it. Yet never has there been an attempt to account for what one may aptly term the current ‘metareferential turn’ on a larger, transmedial scale. This is what The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation undertakes to do as a sequel to its predecessor, the volume Metareference across Media (vol. 4 in the series ‘Studies in Intermediality’), which was dedicated to theoretical issues and transhistorical case studies. Coming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors to the present volume propose explanations of impressive subtlety, breadth and depth for the current situation in addition to exploring individual forms and functions of metareference which may be linked with particular explanations. As expected, there is no monocausal reason to be found for the situation under scrutiny, yet the proposals made have in their compination a remarkable explanatory power which contributes to a better understanding of an important facet of current media production and reception.The essays assembled in the volume, which also contains an introduction with a detailed survey over the possibilities of accounting for the metareferential turn, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film and art history.
