Synopses & Reviews
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.
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"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
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"A virtuoso performance....What a remarkable show." Kirkus
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"Gass's most ambitious literary work to date...without a doubt a literary event." Booklist
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"The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling." Robert Kelly, New York Times Book Review
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"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
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"Truly one of the great books of our time." The Review of Contemporary Fiction
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.