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:
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In spring of 1846, Edgar Allan Poe moved from New York City to his country cottage in Fordham where he wrote "The Philosophy of Composition", an essay that promises to recount the method he used to write his famous poem "The Raven" (1845). In the...
This book contains a selection of the too numerous addresses which Lewis gave during the late war and the years that immediately followed it. All were composed in response to personal requests and for particular audiences, without thought of...
The correspondence between E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood is a fascinating record of the professional and personal lives of two major British writers from the 1930s to the 1960s. The letters of the 1930s reveal how Forster and Isherwood...
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study."...
In this searching and courageous work, Ayn Rand cuts through the haze of sentimentality and vague thinking that surrounds the subject of art. For the first time a precise definition is given to art, and a careful analysis made of its nature. With...
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the...
In a series of conversations with Between the Covers’s David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—both her process and her philosophy—with all the wisdom, profundity, and rigour we expect from one of our...
"Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him…" A poetic and impressionistic tribute to those who perished in World War I-and those who lived,...