On Being Blue
A Philosophical Inquiry
$18.75
- Paperback
112 pages
- Release Date
15 March 2014
Summary
A discursive essay on the powers of the color blue in literature and life, written with typical wit, style, and control by a true master of experimental fiction and the art of the essay.
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 g…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590177181 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1590177185 |
| Author: | William H. Gass, Mitchell Gorra |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 112 |
| Edition: | Main |
| Release Date: | 15 March 2014 |
| Weight: | 132g |
| Dimensions: | 15mm x 127mm x 202mm |
| Series: | New York Review Books (Paperback) |
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Critics Review
“A book no person who loves writing and the sound writing makes should be without.” –Thomas LeClair, The New Republic
“it is a talismanic, self-contained kind of book that seems more giving, more delicious every time one returns.” The Guardian A book no person who loves writing and the sound writing makes should be without The New Republic Gass is a philosopher-voluptuary, someone who romances language with a roue’s cunning, and isn’t afraid to play with words and ideas for sheer sport. Diane Ackerman On Being Blue is a luminous work, a tour de force on blue, that word (and color) reverberant with what is called experience. On Being Blue celebrates both language and that which it represents and carefully draws our attention to that difficult middle ground on which the writer finds himself in lifelong struggle to join the two without sullying or smearing the clarities of either. Gilbert Sorrentino This is a tour de force…a virtuoso performance of great imaginative force. Los Angeles Times An enchanting book. John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review A blue-black, slightly brackish beauty of a book, a philosophical essay written, for the most part, with the lilt of a Renaissance epithalamium. Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World
William H. Gass
William H. Gass
William H. Gass (b. 1924) is an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He grew up in Ohio and is a former professor of philosophy at Washington University. Among his books are six works of fiction and nine books of essays, including Tests of Time (2002), A Temple of Texts (2006), and Life Sentences (2012). His story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) was republished in 2014. Gass lives with his wife, the architect Mary Gass, in St. Louis.
Michael Gorra
Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012) was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. His earlier books include After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, and Rushdie (1997) and The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany (2004). He has taught at Smith College since 1985, where he is now the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.
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