Most Popular Books by William Gaddis

A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis. At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in the endlessly ballooning bubble of the J R Family of Companies. First published in 1975 and winner of the National Book Award in 1976, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America’s romance with finance. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast to the berserk publicist Davidoff. Told almost entirely through dialogue, William Gaddis’s novel is both a literary tour de force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.

William Gaddis published only four novels during his lifetime, but with those works he earned himself a reputation as one of America''s greatest novelists. Less well known is Gaddis''s body of excellent critical writings. Here is a wide range of his original essays, some published for the first time. From "''Stop Player. Joke No. 4,''" Gaddis''s first national publication and the basis for his projected history of the player piano, to the title essay about missed opportunities in America during the past fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces," an examination of the relationship between the writer and the problem of religion-this diverse collection displays the power of an autonomous literary intelligence in an age increasingly dominated by political and religious conservatism.

The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn''t read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.

A revelatory collection of correspondence by the lauded author of titanic American classics such as The Recognitions and J R, shedding light on his staunchly private life. UPDATED WITH OVER TWO DOZEN NEW LETTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and also reveal the extent to which he drew upon events in his life for his fiction. Here we see him forging his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award–winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to produce A Frolic of His Own (1994). Resuming his lifelong obsession with mechanization and the arts, he finishes a last novel, Agapē Agape (published in 2002), as he lies dying. This newly revised edition includes clarifying notes by Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, as well as an afterword by the author’s daughter, Sarah Gaddis.

A biting satire, JR features JR, an eleven-year-old capitalist, who embodies the cash culture he grows up in.The young JR manipulates his meagre economic beginnings including a shipment of Navy surplus picnic forks, a defaulted bond issue and turns them into a massive paper empire. The novel''s satiric assault upon the American Dream, and the economics it represents makes a compulsive read andthe seminal American novel.

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.

A dazzling fourth novel by the author of The Recognitions, Carpenter’s Gothic, and JR uses his considerable powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to take on the American legal system.

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude''s African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action--revealed in Gaddis''s inimitable virtuoso dialoge—is Paul''s wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad--and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis''s inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter''s Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).

Das satirische Porträt von nichts weniger als der gesamten modernen Welt - einer der wichtigsten Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts! Wyatt Gwyon wächst als Priestersohn unter der rigiden Obhut seiner Tante in der Provinz Neuenglands auf und entwickelt ein zeichnerisches Talent. Schließlich landet er Ende der vierziger Jahre im New Yorker Greenwich Village, wo er aus Not zu einem genialen Kunstfälscher wird. Doch er kopiert nicht etwa die alten Meister, sondern erfindet neue ”Originale“ und arbeitet damit korrupten Händlern und Hehlern in die Hände. Um ihn herum gibt es ein ganzes Heer an Künstlern, Kunstexperten, Schriftstellern, Geistlichen, Forschern und Politikern, die sich alle in einem Netz aus Lügen an der Fälschung der Welt beteiligen. Mit diesem sprachgewaltigen, amüsant und wild wuchernden Epos, das 1955 in den USA erschien, ist William Gaddis ein großer Wurf gelungen, ein Zeitroman über eine bodenlose, auf Lug, Trug und Schein aufgebaute Welt, ein Paukenschlag von einem Buch, das zu den bedeutendsten Meisterwerken der Literatur zählt und als Schlüsselroman der Moderne gilt.