The Tunnel Author: William H. Gass American Literature Series April 1999 672 pages, 6 x 9.25 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-213-1 Retail Paperback Price:$15.95 Our Paperback Price: $12.76—20% OFF!

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Book Description

Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

Click here to download an audio sample of William H. Gass reading The Tunnel.

About the Author

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis.

Praise

"Gass has produced a book that burrows inside us then wails like a beast, a book that mainlines a century's terror direct to the brain."—Albert Mobilio, Voice Literary Supplement

"A virtuoso performance . . . What a remarkable show."—Kirkus

"Gass's most ambitious literary work to date . . . without a doubt a literary event . . . Kohler's strehttp://www.dalkeyarchive.com/admin/books/edit/12 Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinoisam-of-consciousness carries both deep thoughts and sheer nonsense, and he is, by turns, funny, irritating, gross, poignant, and brilliant. Gass has his antihero ponder the significance of everything from his obesity and small penis to the poetry of Rilke, the subjectivity of history, and the nature of depravity in a narrative that is both virtuosic and indulgent."—Booklist

"The masterpiece . . . of this 70-year-old American master . . . The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling . . . The rhythmic pressure of its language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in this novel! . . .We revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things alive with interest."—Robert Kelly, New York Times Book Review

"Gass allows his narrator to make a world within words, for the concerns of this novel's prose are both poetic and encyclopedic . . . Gass's prose is as musical and inventive as ever."—Philip Graham, Chicago Tribune

"Gass writes brilliantly: aphorisms, lists, curses, metaphors so baroque they have plots. He pours sentences like a Bethlehem foundry in the good old days. They make molten music that hisses everything from bawdy ditties to romantic opera. Out of these sentences emerges a ripe, overluscious, deliquescent world, rotten through and through, but so solid that you try to flick the flies off the page."—Will Blythe, Esquire

"Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark, with an obsessiveness bordering on Brodkey baroque. The eye can't rest, nor the mind mist . . . Gass has written a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel."—John Leonard, Nation

"Surely at least once per page, I leaned back in my chair and felt that opiated dilation of the senses, that vicious surplus, that glowworm flash of being that I can get only from language affixed to the page, and then only when a master has affixed it there."—Sven Birkerts, Atlantic

"The sheer beauty and bravura of Gass's sentences are overwhelming, breathtaking; the novel is a pharaoh's tomb of linguistic treasures . . . Language is not merely foregrounded here, but given a life of its own . . . Truly one of the great books of our time."—The Review of Contemporary Fiction

"The Tunnel is a 650 page meditation on history, hatred, unhappiness, and language, cast in the form of a novel. It is unforgettable reading. The kind of richly woven novel that dwells in the mind and memory long after the last page is read and the book set back upon the shelf."—The Midwest Book Review

More Information

Also by William H. Gass:
A Temple of Texts
Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas
The Tunnel read by William H. Gass
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife