RaveBOMB\"In all the heave of the William H. Gass Reader (944 pages, to be exact), one thing remains constant: Gass relieves the world by tending it back into words and by redirecting knowledge back into language ... Across the writer’s oeuvre, Gass does not stop at discovering and unpacking the rarity of sustained awareness—he specializes in articulating the acuities of it ... Throughout The William H. Gass Reader, even though Gass seems to be after so much at once, he has ordered his own awareness so that he can always get back to the text, argue himself into it, and tussle with his lines until they waltz unique. His work is thus starkly realistic even when it pretends not to be, vividly heartfelt even when its ideas seem rooted to the mind only ... The William H. Gass Reader is a calculated bulk of alertness, a hulking recognition of the world, and what a season for it to reach us, in the crackle of a burly November.\
