Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

Overview

"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801484896
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/15/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	968,887
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.82(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William H. Gass is head of the International Writers Center at Washington University. He lives in St. Louis and has been named winner of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award.

Editorial Reviews

"Reading these essays is like watching a glass blower at work over the flame, seeing his forms emerge—at times amusing trinkets, at times vessels of beauty and purpose. . . . The vases of Mr. Gass's making (something like extruded golden bowls with nearly undetectable flaws) would be in such a thoughtful essay as 'The Story of the State of Nature,' in which he mounts, in clear expository fashion, an entire history of narrative."—Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review

"Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page. . . . These pieces deal with Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in relation to their thought; various species of the avant-garde from Pierre de Ronsard to Degas, Beckett and the Bauhaus; the exacting demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's 'banal and hokey' choices in fiction; and the abyss between the moral viewpoints expressed in works of art and the lives of their creators. Gass's deeply felt essays . . . are quotable, flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"These essays showcase precision intellectual workmanship, displaying intricate multifaceted models of how writing and thinking relate to life."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading.

Washington Post

William H. Gass is embattled . . . and in Finding a Form he confronts the conundrum of the writer that he has faced in previous essays: the word is sacred. Though there are no longer sacred texts, 'writing puts the writer in illusory command of the world, empowers someone otherwise powerless, but with a power no more pointed than a pencil' . . . Against the odds, William Gass, a tortured man in the attic, has empowered himself to write scripture in an unredemptive time.”

The New York Times

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