Talk:William H. Gass

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I found this article quite funny. I looked up William H. Gass after reading his introduction to the Vintage Paperback edition of Rilke's "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." I would not normally have done such a thing, but Gass's writing was so conspicuously bad that I couldn't resist finding out just who he was- turns out he's the best prose stylist living!

This is, in a nutshell, why contemporary lit is such a joke. This guy is the most pretentious, untalented, awkward writer I've ever read. It leaps off the page. He's a no-talent Nabokov, from what I can gather, indulging in alliteration in a way that echoes Nabokov, but that Nabokov himself would never have done, having been blessed with an ear for language. May God have mercy on the soul of anyone so lost as to praise this nitwit.

Or maybe he just phoned that one in. Who knows? I might read more of him to find out. But that introduction is the single worst-written thing I've ever read. I could teach a class on how not to write using only that introduction.

[edit] For the poster who doesn't seem to grasp Gass

I would recommend that you get a better sense of the genius of William H. Gass by reading the essay "Carrots,Noses,Snow,Rose,Roses" and the short story "The Pedersen Kid" in juxtaposition. Crito54 18:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)