Уильям Гэсс - циклы книг | Бумажные издания

Вы полагаете, что "святая троица" современного постмодернизма - Павич, Фаулз и Кундера - стала такой, какой стала, САМА ПО СЕБЕ? Вовсе нет!

Раньше - и гораздо раньше - существовала другая "святая троица", СДЕЛАВШАЯ современный постмодернизм таким, каков он есть теперь. Двух авторов - Барта и Пинчона - российский читатель уже знает. Перед вами - третий. Уильям Гэсс. Абсолютный классик стиля. Абсолютный мастер Слова. Единственный писатель, способный создать нечто, подобное "Картезианской сонате" - сборнику концептуально связанных сюрреалистических новелл-притч, изящно и тонко иллюстрирующих постулаты декартовской философии...

A notable novelist and critic considers the works, lives, preoccupations, and achievements of Valery, Freud, Stein, Sartre, Henry Miller, Joyce, Rilke, Proust, Nabokov, Faulkner, Colette, and other modern writers.

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 are 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".

Gass’s new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life—futile, comic, anarchic—arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.

It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up, becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy self—a professor with a fantasy goal: to establish the Inhumanity Museum . . . as Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless.

Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another.

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."

Июньский номер целиком посвящен классику русской и американской литератур ХХ столетия Владимиру Набокову (1899 — 1977) и называется «Сорок лет без Набокова». Предваряет тематический выпуск статья составителя номера — литературоведа, критика, филолога Н. Г. Мельникова (1970) “В одуряюще сложной перспективе памяти…”. В номере читатель найдет: выбранные места из деловой переписки Владимира Набокова в переводе Александра Ливерганта и с комментариями Николая Мельникова - поклоннику Набокова предоставляется возможность вжиться в будни большого писателя. В специальный номер включены также три разных перевода «Баллады Лонгвудской долины», более…

Признанный классик американского постмодернизма Уильям Гэсс в течение 26 лет работал над монументальной и личной книгой. Её герой, университетский профессор Уильям Колер, завершивший историческое исследование о Холокосте «Вина и невинность в гитлеровской Германии», обнаруживает, что предисловие, которое он пишет, постепенно разрастается в жуткую исповедь о его собственной жизни. Испугавшись, что эти признания прочитает жена, Колер прячет их между страницами своей книги, одновременно начиная рыть в подвале дома лаз, ведущий в никуда... Текст безжалостно погружает читателя в самые глубокие закоулки человеческой души, раскрываясь как…

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners.

First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

A literary delight--a reading feast; a Gassian celebration--the best of the best: more than fifty selections chosen by Gass himself from his essays, criticism, commentary, short stories, and novels.

It begins with his essays, in which Gass looks back at varying points in his writing life at those writers (from Plato, Hobbes, and James, to Joyce, Beckett, Stein, and Gaddis) whose work he found inspiring . . . and at those whose work he explores and embraces (Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; Stendhal's The Red and the Black). He writes (from A Temple of Texts) on the nature and value of writing ("The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words").
Here is a rich experience of Gass's short fiction: from Eyes, his masterfully crafted novella, "In Camera," about collecting, hording; about suspicions run amok . . . from Cartesian Sonata . . . and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a mythical reimagining of America's heartland.
And from his nimble, daredevil novels: Middle C (2013), the chronicle of an Austrian-born man who, as a child with his mother, relocates to America's Midwest (Woodbine, Ohio), grows up a low-skilled amateur piano player to become a music professor at a small Bible college; his only hobby a fantasy life as the curator of his Inhumanity Museum . . . and from The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime" --Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times).

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.