Eyes - by William H Gass (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Charity" examines the roles of asking, giving, and receiving through the prism of a young lawyer who offers a simple gift. "In Camera" takes us into a photography shop owner's incomparable collection of images. "Don't Even Try, Sam" gives us the voice of the prop piano from Casablanca, and "Soliloquy for a Chair" is narrated by a folding chair in a barbershop that is ultimately fated for destruction. Incisive, darkly funny, formally innovative and linguistically stunning, Eyes is a tour de force of modern fiction.

Review Quotes

"Enthralling and inventive. . . . Gass delights with devious wordplay, rhetorical gymnastics and luscious description." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"William Gass [is] our greatest living champion of the sentence." --The New York Review of Books

"Dazzlingly literary. . . . This is the kind of bracing writing that you can really feel, and it makes you feel more alive." --Paste

"Mesmerizing. . . . Compelling." --The Huffington Post

"Impressive. . . . Demonstrates Gass's continued experiments with narrative form." --The New York Times Book Review

"Powerful, passionate. . . . Gass at his best and most mysterious. . . . All of [the stories] are distinguished by Gass's dry wit, verbal facility and rich prose style." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Brilliant. . . . A wonderful entry point into the Gassian literary cosmos." --Electric Literature

"Quietly suspenseful, emotionally lustrous. . . . The literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, seething, trenchant, hilarious. . . . Gass is a mind-bending original of phenomenal brilliance, artistry, wit, and insight." --Booklist (starred review)

"Excellent. . . . [Gass is] an exquisite maker of sentences, weighing his prose like a poet for rhythm, consonance, and intellectual heft." --Kirkus Reviews

"Gass proves himself a master diviner, able to tap the deepest and most mysterious reservoirs." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

William H. Gass--essayist, novelist, literary critic--was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction and nine books of essays, including Life Sentences, A Temple of Texts, and Tests of Time, and was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. He died in 2017.