Throughout his career, William Gass (1924-2017) relentlessly pushed at the boundaries of language, celebrating the music of the sentence and the aesthetics of the written word. Spanning his career, this generous anthology includes extracts from the novels Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Middle C, Cartesian Sonata, and his magnum opus, The Tunnel. Gass was truly a "writer's writer," and his personal reflections on the power of the written word are complemented by inspired essays on a wide range of literary figures, among them, Rabelais, Colette, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jorge Luis Borges.