MixedThe Baffler\"On its face, then, the Reader is both a tribute to the long and varied career of William H. Gass, critic, philosophy professor, and writer of stories—a tribute that prematurely became a memorial—and a portrait the artist wishes to present to posterity ... On the other hand, because of a few significant omissions, and because of the way Gass’s other works have been cannibalized to produce this text, it reminds me of a kind of zoo or asylum: the work as a whole is meant for some high-minded study, but the inhabitants are nevertheless forlornly caged or rubber-roomed and kind of crazy ... Like any longstanding reader of Gass, I have my favorites, and so my quibbles about what failed to make the final cut should be taken for just that, and although there is much that I would add, there is little I’d subtract ... The way this book is constructed, with the more personal essays serving as an introduction to selections of Gass’s fiction, followed by a far more substantial offering of theory and criticism, seems to suggest an upside-down hierarchy of importance, where the great work he spent a lifetime on is offered up as mere context for the nonfiction, rather than the other way around. This is why the book must be considered a failure if it is meant to be a survey of his work ... But on the other hand, if the reader of the Reader actually makes it through, and manages to read much of what it contains, then they will be prepared to negotiate the rocks upon which many a critic has foundered...\
Gregor Hens
RaveFull StopPart of the pleasure of reading Hens’s book is these details, and the way they illustrate how his own life spans a pivotal moment in the history of tobacco ... Nicotine, in this sense, is a time capsule, one that serves not only to illustrate Hens’s conceit that cigarettes served as a fundamental building block to his identity, but also to show how cigarettes have been integral to post-war society as a whole ...it can’t be denied that the book is an addiction memoir. It delves into the process of the author’s recovery, his relapses, his changes of heart; above all, it is a book about the author’s desire to change his habits, never mind that Hens frames it as a change in his identity ...it is entertaining, and Hens manages the addiction narrative with uncommon wit and narrative energy, interspersing his memories with self-deprecatory stabs at pop science, psychology and philosophy.
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Trans. by Lee Klein
RaveFull Stop\"...astonishingly good ... [Moya] offers up a rendition of Bernhard that retains the Austrian’s hallmark acid social commentary and bitter laughs, and yet is also so true to its source material that it manages to reveal as much about Bernhard’s style as it does about Salvadoran society.\
