Joe Murphy on William Gass
Hi Everyone-
Well, I had a particularly nice, if short, vacation, with visits to friends in Belmont, NC, and Richmond, VA. I'll have to admit I didn't get that much of my planned reading done--it was a pretty busy trip. I did get to listen to the excellent, unabridged audio version of John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels, and I very highly recommend it. It's chock full of fascinating, diverting, and often very gossipy stories of Venice, centering around the 1996 fire that destroyed one of its most prized buildings, the Fenice, the storied opera house. As interesting as the story of the fire, its investigation, and the planned rebuilding was, many of the other stories Berendt discovered were even more riveting, including a power struggle within the American-led Save Venice Foundation and the exceedingly curious story of the possibly dubious Ezra Pound Foundation. The audiobook made a 14-hour round trip car ride go much, much more quickly.
I thought I'd also take this opportunity to mention William H. Gass' new book A Temple of Texts. There are any number of books out that review the authors' opinions on what makes great literature, but Gass' new work is something special. Gass' incredible sense of literary play, so evident in his (literally) labrythine novel The Tunnel, is the perfect for speaking of, and particularly for appreciating, the work of other brillinat authors. A Temple of Texts includes highly unique appreciations of great writers from Erasmus to Rilke to Flann O'Brien to Stanley Elkin. It also includes Gass' "fifty literary pillars," his picks for the greatest of the great books, with very short but exceedingly persuasive comments on each.
I for one was so dazzled by Gass' discussion of the similarly-named (to the point that Gass has often been commended for his work) William Gaddis, and particularly of Gaddis' masterwork The Recognitions, a fictional study of forgery and all that theme represents, that I'm about ready (gulp!) to take on the 1000+ page novel myself. I loved Gaddis' hilarious and scathing novel A Frolic of His Own, and this looks like a good opportunity to take on this acknowledged, if seldom-read, masterpiece. Anyone care to join me? We've brought in copies of The Recognitions for our upcoming Penguin buy-two-get-one-free sale (of which, more next week), so stop by and give these terrific books a try.
Till Next Week,
Joe Murphy
Well, I had a particularly nice, if short, vacation, with visits to friends in Belmont, NC, and Richmond, VA. I'll have to admit I didn't get that much of my planned reading done--it was a pretty busy trip. I did get to listen to the excellent, unabridged audio version of John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels, and I very highly recommend it. It's chock full of fascinating, diverting, and often very gossipy stories of Venice, centering around the 1996 fire that destroyed one of its most prized buildings, the Fenice, the storied opera house. As interesting as the story of the fire, its investigation, and the planned rebuilding was, many of the other stories Berendt discovered were even more riveting, including a power struggle within the American-led Save Venice Foundation and the exceedingly curious story of the possibly dubious Ezra Pound Foundation. The audiobook made a 14-hour round trip car ride go much, much more quickly.I thought I'd also take this opportunity to mention William H. Gass' new book A Temple of Texts. There are any number of books out that review the authors' opinions on what makes great literature, but Gass' new work is something special. Gass' incredible sense of literary play, so evident in his (literally) labrythine novel The Tunnel, is the perfect for speaking of, and particularly for appreciating, the work of other brillinat authors. A Temple of Texts includes highly unique appreciations of great writers from Erasmus to Rilke to Flann O'Brien to Stanley Elkin. It also includes Gass' "fifty literary pillars," his picks for the greatest of the great books, with very short but exceedingly persuasive comments on each.I for one was so dazzled by Gass' discussion of the similarly-named (to the point that Gass has often been commended for his work) William Gaddis, and particularly of Gaddis' masterwork The Recognitions, a fictional study of forgery and all that theme represents, that I'm about ready (gulp!) to take on the 1000+ page novel myself. I loved Gaddis' hilarious and scathing novel A Frolic of His Own, and this looks like a good opportunity to take on this acknowledged, if seldom-read, masterpiece. Anyone care to join me? We've brought in copies of The Recognitions for our upcoming Penguin buy-two-get-one-free sale (of which, more next week), so stop by and give these terrific books a try.Till Next Week,
Joe Murphy
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