{"product_id":"on-being-blue-isbn-9781590177181","title":"On Being Blue","description":"\u003ci\u003eOn Being Blue\u003c\/i\u003e is a book about everything blue—sex and  sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It  brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among  contemporary American writers, can do. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Gass writes:    \u003cbr\u003eOf the colors, blue and green have the greatest  emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn  up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and  water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside  caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens  the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire;  green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed,  but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant  black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most  suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high  bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow  smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all  profoundly qualify our states of feeling.\"'Blue' is poetically reconfigured as a shifting state to which the beholder perpetually attunes.\" —\u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[\u003ci\u003eOn Being Blue\u003c\/i\u003e] is a talismanic, self-contained kind of book that seems more giving, more delicious each time one returns.\" —Brian Dillon, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The mark of a good essay is its ability to span worlds — illuminate complex ideas with a careful, personal touch. In \u003ci\u003eOn Being Blue\u003c\/i\u003e there is life and death, pleasure, sadness, sex, personhood, theology — worlds of words.\" —Jaun Vidal, \u003ci\u003eNPR\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A book no person who loves writing and the sound writing makes should be without.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gass  is a philosopher-voluptuary, someone who romances language with a  roué’s cunning, and isn’t afraid to play with words and ideas for sheer  sport.\" —Diane Ackerman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eOn Being Blue\u003c\/i\u003e is a luminous work, a tour de force on blue, that word (and color) reverberant with what is called experience. \u003ci\u003eOn Being Blue \u003c\/i\u003ecelebrates  both language and that which it represents and carefully draws our  attention to that difficult middle ground on which the writer finds  himself in lifelong struggle to join the two without sullying or  smearing the clarities of either.” —Gilbert Sorrentino\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a tour de force...a virtuoso performance of great imaginative force.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “An enchanting book.” —John Bayley, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A blue-black, slightly brackish beauty of a book, a philosophical  essay written, for the most part, with the lilt of a Renaissance  epithalamium.” —Larry McMurtry, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eWilliam H. Gass\u003c\/b\u003e (b. 1924) is an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He grew up in Ohio and is a former professor of philosophy at Washington University. Among his books are six works of fiction and nine books of essays, including \u003ci\u003eTests of Time\u003c\/i\u003e (2002), \u003ci\u003eA Temple of Texts\u003c\/i\u003e (2006), and \u003ci\u003eLife Sentences\u003c\/i\u003e (2012). New York Review Books will republish his story collection \u003ci\u003eIn the Heart of the Heart of the Country\u003c\/i\u003e (1968) in 2014. Gass lives with his wife, the architect Mary Gass, in St. Louis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Gorra\u003c\/b\u003e’s \u003ci\u003ePortrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece \u003c\/i\u003e(2012) was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. His earlier books include \u003ci\u003eAfter Empire: Scott, Naipaul, and Rushdie\u003c\/i\u003e (1997) and \u003ci\u003eThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany\u003c\/i\u003e (2004). He has taught at Smith College since 1985, where he is now the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300422373605,"sku":"NP9781590177181","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590177181.jpg?v=1767734078","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/on-being-blue-isbn-9781590177181","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}