A great deal of this material is perplexing, demanding, and obscure, but the author’s beautiful writing is always well worth...
A 900-page Gass-ian celebration.
This massive selection of writings by the late Gass (Eyes: Novellas and Stories, 2015, etc.), chosen by the author shortly before he died in 2017, is a fitting grand finale to an impressive and influential career. The 50 selections in the book, the oldest from 1958, are divided into four categories: Introduction, Fiction, Artists, and Theory. In “Fifty Literary Pillars,” about literature that influenced his own, his description of Jorge Luis Borges could also describe Gass: “Another amazing mind. Here is the consciousness of a devoted, playful, skeptical intelligence, a man made civilized by the library, as if to prove it can be done.” In “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” (1970), Gass writes that “forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed. Indeed, many of the so-called antinovels are really metafictions.” A whole generation of writers practiced metafiction: William Gaddis' The Recognitions was a “thunderclap,” and Gass also explores John Hawkes, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. As a philosophy professor at Washington University, metafiction was a wellspring for his criticism. As he writes at the end of “The Book as a Container of Consciousness,” it “remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create…but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about.” As a fiction writer, Gass was regularly praised for his subtle prose style and daunting ideas, but the books sold poorly. The Tunnel was too immense and labyrinthine, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country was too dense and lyrical, and his novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (not included here) pushed its prose to the breaking point. Literature is finally catching up with him, and this compendious, literary extravaganza should spark a Gass revival.
A great deal of this material is perplexing, demanding, and obscure, but the author’s beautiful writing is always well worth a visit.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87474-5
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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