William Gaddis Books In Order

Novels

The Recognitions (1955)
JR (1975)
Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)
A Frolic of His Own (1994)

Collections

Agape Agape (2002)
The Rush for Second Place (2002)

Non fiction

Letters of William Gaddis (2013)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Letters of William Gaddis
(2013)

William Gaddis Books Overview

The Recognitions

Wyatt Gwyon’s desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate ‘originals’ pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon’s forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ world, and Gaddis’ novel pre empts our common obsessions by almost half a century. This novel tackles the blurring of perceptual boundaries, The Matrix and Bladerunner pale in comparison to this epic novel.

JR

A great masterpiece by William Gaddis, with a new introduction by Rick Moody. Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the American spirit into something dangerous, yet pervasive and unassailable. At the center of the novel is a hilarious eleven year old J R who with boyish enthusiasm turns a few basic lessons in capitalist principles, coupled with a young boy’s lack of conscience, into a massive and exploitative paper empire. The result is one of the funniest and most disturbing stories ever told about the corruption of the American dream.

Carpenter’s Gothic

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. ‘An unholy landmark of a novel an extra turret added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion Gaddis has been building in American letters’ Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review ‘Everything in this compelling and brilliant vision of America the packaged sleaze, the incipient violence, the fundamentalist furor, the constricted sexuality is charged with the force of a volcanic eruption. Carpenter’s Gothic will reenergize and give shape to contemporary literature.’ Walter Abish

A Frolic of His Own

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.

Agape Agape

The late William Gaddis wrote 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 via 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. This ‘man in the bed’ lies dying, thinking anxiously about the book he still plans to write, grumbling about the deterioration of civilization and trying to explain his obsession to the world before he pas*ses away or goes mad. Agape Agape continues Gaddis’s career long reflection via the form of the novel on those aspects of the corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts. It is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

The Rush for Second Place

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.