In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

author
William Gass

the shpiel
What do you get when you cross James Joyce with Amy Hempel?  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass.  Gass creates five beautiful and wholly different 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.

To quote Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times, “These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language. They are told sparely, hauntingly, with compassion and a remarkable exploratory courage.” This collection is a must read for anyone even nominally interested in literature, form, or just how far and how well the English language can travel.  The novella, “Pederson Kid” is a masterpiece of pacing, style, and compression.  And his short story, “Order of Insects” is straight out of Kafka oeuvre, only better written.  I’m jealous of all of you people out there who haven’t read this collection yet, you’re in for a left-brain-blowing good time.

something to note
His essays are excellent. If you're interested in literary form check out Habitations of the Word, Finding Form, Fiction and the Figures of Life, and A Temple of Texts.

some other things this author has written
Fiction
Omensetter's Luck (1966)
In The Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968)
The Tunnel (1995)
Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998)

]Non-Fiction
Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970)
On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976)
The World Within the Word (1978)
Habitations of the Word (1984)
Finding a Form (1996)
Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999)
Tests of Time (2002)
A Temple of Texts (2006)