000 02257nam a2200241 a 4500
001 039074
005 20231009193430.0
008 130214t20122011nyu 000 e eng
010 _a2011033577
020 _a9780307595843
042 _apcc
050 0 0 _aPS3557.A845
_bL54 2012
082 0 0 _a814.54 GAS
100 1 _aGass, William H
_f. 1924-
245 1 0 _aLife sentences
_b: literary judgments and accounts
_c/ William H. Gass
250 _aFirst edition
260 _aNew York
_b: Alfred A. Knopf
_c, c2012.
300 _a349 p.
_c; 22 cm.
505 0 _aThe 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.
520 _aA 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.
650 0 _aBooks and reading
942 _cMO
999 _c270810
_d270810