Agape Agape

William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction a subtle concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998 he distilled the whole mass into a fiction a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.