‘The William H. Gass Reader’

Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions:

  1. William H. Gass loved words. “A word is a wanderer,” he wrote in “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses.” “Except in the most general syntactical sense, it has no home.”
  2. Gass longed to make worthy homes for words. He often chose lists.
  3. Lists were his secular litanies. Lists allowed Gass, who always longed to be a poet, to ladle his words into natural meter.
  4. We are lucky if we find a sentence or paragraph to hold onto—as a reader, as a writer. We write them on index cards and impale them into cork board. We let them collect dust under a lamp. We are strangely blessed if we can find a writer who can carry us even further—through a book, through a life.
  5. I return to Gass like a pilgrimage. His final offering, The William H. Gass Reader, is a gift. Nearly a thousand pages of his essays about writers and artists, his theories about fiction, and selections from his novellas and novels.

more here.