First published 2012
William Gass opens his personal library and shares what decades of reading have taught him. He starts with his own relationship to books, then turns his attention to writers who shaped him. Kafka appears as half man, half metaphor. Nietzsche emerges through sickness and health. Proust gets careful examination alongside Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Katherine Anne Porter. Gass also confronts difficult subjects like Knut Hamsun, the Nobel laureate who supported the Nazis, and broader questions about the Holocaust. The collection moves from personal reflection to literary analysis, examining how form and metaphor work in literature. Gass pays special attention to the sentence itself, which he sees as a fundamental building block of all writing. He applies rigorous standards to avant garde and traditional literature alike. These essays reveal how a master writer reads other masters and what he discovers in their work.
Genres: essays, literary-criticism, literary-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, criticism, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: literary-analysis, personal-reflection
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
368 pages · Hardcover · Knopf