At his best, William Gass is a voice that starts with an insistent, tickling trickle and ends in a flood, the sluice gates open to a welter of words and the sky falling. Now, with as many candles on ...

It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge of the Imagination. “It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

William H. Gass is a glutton of language. Like a chef who can't cook without nibbling, he lards his own writing with similes and metaphors in the spirit of the books he loves, savoring them through ...