Synopses & Reviews
A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.
It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust).
Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.
Gass embraces the avant-garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts.
Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.
About the Author
William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of two novels, The Tunnel and Omensetter’s Luck, and eight books of essays, including A Temple of Texts, Tests of Time, and Finding a Form. Gass is a former professor of philosophy at Washington University. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, the architect Mary Henderson Gass.
Table of Contents
THE PERSONALS COLUMN
The Literary Miracle
Slices of Life in a Library
Spit in the Mitt
The First Fourth Following 9/11
What Freedom of Expression Means, Especially in Times Like These
Retrospection
OLD FAVORITES AND FRESH ENEMIES
A Wreath for the Grave of Gertrude Stein
Reading Proust
Nietzsche: In Illness and in Health
Kafka: Half a Man, Half a Metaphor
Unsteady as She Goes: Malcolm Lowry’s Cinema Inferno
The Bush of Belief
Henry James’s Curriculum Vitae
An Introduction to John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain
Katherine Anne Porter’s Fictional Self
Knut Hamsun
Kinds of Killing
THE BIGGS LECTURES IN THE CLASSICS
Form: Eidos
Mimesis
Metaphor
THEORETICS
Lust
Narrative Sentences
The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence