The Brooklyn Rail

Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife turns forty in '08 and to celebrate OFF THE RAIL will be hosting author William H. Gass, who will read from and reflect on this highly innovative text and his distinguished writing career.

This reading has been made possible in part by the generous financial assistance of Dalkey Archive Press.

Fiction: Omensetter's Luck (1966), In The Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968), The Tunnel (1995), Cartesian Sonata: and Other Novellas (1998),

Non-Fiction: Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word (1984), Finding a Form (1996), Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999), Tests of Time (2002), A Temple of Texts (2006)

Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1969. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The Tunnel in 1997. Gass has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism twice. More recently, Gass has won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in the Memory of Newton Arvin.