В настоящей антологии представлена малая проза знаменитых английских и американских писателей XX века — Томаса Вулфа, В. С. Найпола, Уильяма Гасса, Натанаэла Уэста, Джеймса Джонса — в переводах одного из самых известных российских переводчиков — Виктора Голышева. В повестях, включенных в книгу, читателю открывается многообразие стилистических манер и тематическая разноплановость, характерные для литературы XX столетия: обостренная наблюдательность в описании жестокого организма города у Вулфа; гротескный взгляд постороннего на непривычную жизнь и культуру маленькой колониальной страны, обретшей независимость, у Найпола; повествовательная недоговоренность, отражающая «разорванность»...

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. He also is engaged in another secret: digging a tunnel out of his own basement. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

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: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are...

Enter the sublime, upside-down / inside-out world of William H. Gass. . in this case where the Eyes have it every which way, including up. . in a dazzling new collection of novellas and stories (six in all) from one of the most revered writers of our time, author of sixteen books, among them, the universally acclaimed The Tunnel ("An extraordinary achievement"-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Middle C("Exhilaratingly ingenious"-Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review cover); and Life Sentences ("A literary miracle"-The New York Observer). This enchanting, Gassian journey begins with "In Camera," an investigation into what is likely to develop when a possibly illicit collection...

Gass’s new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life — futile, comic, anarchic — arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a...

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces — one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s — William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul's poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass's Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce's Dubliners. First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles — through the voices of various participants and observers — the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil.

Экспериментальный рассказ, написанный в 1961 голу. "Сильный снегопад и беспощадный мороз. Домик на отшибе. В нём живёт семья фермеров, жизнь которой самым тесным образом связана с алкоголем. Йорге - пятнадцатилетний паренек, которым все помыкают. Вечно пьяный отец, который ввиду неадекватности живёт в отдельном сарайчике. Мать, которая вроде бы с этим смирилась, и похоже нашла некую отдушину в лице работника Ханса. Большой Ханс – наемный рабочий, хозяин заветных для Йорге порножурналов, имеющий пристрастие к спиртному и небольшую склонность к педофилии. Когда-то они с Йорге были друзьями. В целом это крепко пьющая, но как-то почти дружно сосуществующая семья. Однажды утром Большой...

Вы полагаете, что «святая троица» современного постмодернизма — Павич, Фаулз и Кундера — стала такой, какой стала, САМА ПО СЕБЕ? Вовсе нет! Раньше — и гораздо раньше — существовала другая «святая троица», СДЕЛАВШАЯ современный постмодернизм таким, каков он есть теперь. Двух авторов — Барта и Пинчона — российский читатель уже знает. Перед вами — третий. Уильям Гэсс. Абсолютный классик стиля. Абсолютный мастер Слова. Единственный писатель, способный создать нечто, подобное «Картезианской сонате» — концептуально связанным сюрреалистическим новеллам-притчам, изящно и тонко иллюстрирующим постулаты декартовской философии…