William Gaddis

A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most venerated novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England pastor, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of revered old masters--copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who sells them as the real thing. Gwyon's story is only one of many that fill the pages of a novel that is as monstrously populated as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Throughout, William Gaddis's characters preen and scheme and party and toil, pursuing salvation through the debasement of desire. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by the critics on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions is now recognized as one of the great American novels.

A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis. At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is a running a massive Ponzi scheme out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in endlessly ballooning bubble of the J R Company. First published in 1975, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America's romance with finance. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast, to the berserk publicist Davidoff. Told almost entirely through dialogue, William Gaddis's novel is both a literary tour de force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.

William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action--revealed in Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialoge--is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad--and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).

"Raspoznavanija" (1955) - shedevr Uiljama Geddisa, kotoryj vkhodit v sovremennyj kanon amerikanskoj literatury XX veka i uzhe bolee poluveka pereosmysljaetsja kak proizvedenie v unikalnoj pozitsii mezhdu modernizmom i postmodernizmom. Roman, usvoivshij v sebe luchshie khudozhestvennye priemy i toj i drugoj epokh. Eta dvojstvennost - kljuch k romanu-maskaradu, i odnovremenno ego prokljatie. V trekh chastjakh romana (po kolichestvu stvorok triptikha Ieronima Boskha) rasskazana istorija Uajatta Gvajna, syna kalvinistskogo svjaschennika iz Novoj Anglii, talantlivogo khudozhnika, zakljuchivshego faustovskuju sdelku - poddelyvat polotna starykh masterov dlja nju-jorkskogo art-moshennika Rektala Brauna. Vokrug etogo sjuzhetnogo jadra razvorachivaetsja slozhnaja narrativnaja sistema, okhvatyvajuschaja tri desjatiletija na trekh kontinentakh i obraschennaja k religii, alkhimii, koldovstvu, istorii iskusstva, meditsine, agiografii, mifologii, antropologii, astronomii, metafizike i drugim oblastjam znanija. No nezaurjadnaja eruditsija Geddisa, kak ni paradoksalno, ottolknula pervykh chitatelej "Raspoznavanij", i tolko spustja vremja etot roman poluchil zasluzhennoe priznanie. V 2022 godu, k 100-letiju so dnja rozhdenija Uiljama Geddisa, v serii New York Book Review byli pereizdany kljuchevye proizvedenija pisatelja, a v Universitete Vashingtona v Sent-Luise sostojalas bolshaja konferentsija, posvjaschennaja tvorchestvu avtora. Vlijanie, kotoroe okazal Geddis na mirovuju literaturu, esche nuzhno osmyslit, no, po metkomu zamechaniju Koula Fishmana, "Uiljam Geddis, mozhet byt, ne vash ljubimyj avtor, no on, verojatno, ljubimyj avtor vashego ljubimogo avtora". Perevod Sergeja Karpova

A revelatory collection of correspondence by the lauded author of titanic American classics such as The Recognitions and J R, shedding light on his staunchly private life. Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930, when Gaddis was at boarding school, and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography and are all the more valuable because he was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his first novel, The Recognitions, while living in Mexico; fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica; and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter's Gothic; then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own, which earned him another National Book Award. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel, Agapē Agape, as he is dying.

An essential collection of nonfiction essays by the National Book Award winning author of J R and A Frolic of His Own William Gaddis published only four novels during his lifetime, but with those works he earned himself a reputation as one of America's greatest novelists. Less well known is Gaddis's body of excellent critical writings. Here is a wide range of his original essays, some published for the first time. From "'Stop Player. Joke No. 4, '" Gaddis's first national publication and the basis for his projected history of the player piano, to the title essay about missed opportunities in America during the past fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces," an examination of the relationship between the writer and the problem of religion-this diverse collection displays the power of an autonomous literary intelligence in an age increasingly dominated by political and religious conservatism.

A dazzling fourth novel by the author of The Recognitions, Carpenter's Gothic, and JR uses his considerable powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to take on the American legal system. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.