Finding a Form: Essays: Towards a Response Contagion Theory of Persuasion

William Gass writes about literary language about history about the avant-garde about minimalisms brief vogue about the use of the present tense in fiction (Is it due to the lack of both a sense of history and a belief in the future?) about biography as a form about exile - spiritual and geographical - and he examines the relationship of the writers life to the writers work. With dazzling intelligence and wit Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language whether a sentence or an entire book is a container of consciousness the gateway to anothers mind that we enter for a while and make our own.