On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books (Paperback)) - Softcover

Gass, William H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590177185 ISBN 13: 9781590177181

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2014

Synopsis

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.
Gass writes:
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown and widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of the exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

About this title

Review:

"it is a talismanic, self-contained kind of book that seems more giving, more delicious every time one returns."

(The Guardian)

This is a tour de force...a virtuoso performance of great imaginative force.

(Los Angeles Times)

An enchanting book.

(John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review)

About the Author:

WILLIAM H. GASS is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and emeritus professor of philosophy. His first novel, Omensetter s Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Since then he has published several more works of fiction, including In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The Tunnel, and Middle C. He has also published several collections of essays, including Fiction and the Figures of Life, Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, and Life Sentences. Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller and Solomon R. Guggenheim foundations, four Pushcart Prizes, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the American Book Award, and three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. In 2000, he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1590177185
• ISBN 13: 9781590177181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112