On Being Blue

William H. Gass, Michael Gorra

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Paperback

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English

NYRB Classics
15 March 2014

Philosophy; Popular philosophy

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 are widely distributed,

but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant

black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most

suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high

bright thin 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.

By: William H. Gass
Introduction by: Michael Gorra
Imprint: NYRB Classics
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 128mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 130g
ISBN: 9781590177181
ISBN 10: 1590177185
Pages: 112
Publication Date: 15 March 2014
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for On Being Blue

A book no person who loves writing and the sound writing makes should be without. --Thomas LeClair, The New Republic 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 A blue-black, slightly brackish beauty of a book, a philosophical essay written, for the most part, with the lilt of a Renaissance epithalamium. --Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World