Even Stephen King, much to Bill's astonishment when I told him about it in Paris, many years later, loved The Tunnel and prefaced his own reading at Princeton, where I was guest-teaching at the time, with an opening remark to the crowded audience of academics, students, and leather-clad bikers, 'Have you heard of this guy, William H. Gass? He's unbelievable. Let me read you from his new book,' and so he did.

As literary types speculate about this year's nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature before the October announcement date, UK gamblers are hard at work trying to predict a winner of the prestigious prize.

According to the betting site Ladbrokes, Israeli author Amos Oz has the best odds of winning--the 4 to 1 favorite. The long shots are William H. Gass and Paul Auster, both with 100 to 1 odds. Bob Dylan clocks in with 25 to 1 odds. Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth both have strong 7 to 1 odds. Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon both weigh in with respectable 9 to 1 odds.

The complete list is here.

It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist William H. Gass, (books by this author) born in Fargo, North Dakota (1924). He wanted to write fiction, but he was afraid he wouldn't be able to support himself. So he got a job teaching philosophy, and he was busy teaching and raising three kids, so he wrote slowly. He only had one copy of his manuscript, written on a typewriter, and it was stolen and he had to start all over. When he finally did finish it, it was rejected over and over again. Finally, in 1966, he published Omensetter's Luck. He's also published several books of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Tests of Time (2002), and in 1995 he published The Tunnel (1995), a novel that is more than 600 pages long and took him almost 30 years to write.

Dalkey Archive Press is publishing a lovely new edition of Gass' essay collection Finding a Form (cover illustration by Nicholas Motte, who was interviewed here and here about the work he's been doing for Dalkey, including other Gass covers). Personally, it's one of my favorite WG collections, behind Temple of Texts. First published in 1996, Form features the following: 

• Pulitzer: The People's Prize (excerpt)
• A Failing Grade for the Present Tense
• Finding a Form
• A Fiesta for the Form
• Robert Walker
• Ford's Impressionisms
• The Language of Being and Dying
• Nietzsche: The Polemical Philosopher 
• At Death's Door: Wittgenstein
• Ezra Pound
• Autobiography
• The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde
• Exile
• The Story of the State of Nature
• Nature, Culture, and Cosmos
• The Baby or the Botticelli
• Simplicities 
• The Muse of Prose
• The Book As a Container of Consciousness

Check your local bookstore or an online retailer, but keep in mind that Dalkey's offering it at 20% off. Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has been enjoying his copy.

Some camps were for show, like the back lots of movie studios, and were unable to make direct contributions to the killings, only mislead chosen visitors about them. In a few ghettos (Warsaw is the best known) there were uprisings as well as scattered signs of individual resistance by the Polish underground; but what slowed the German war on humanity (besides the Soviet army) was simply the size and consequent inefficiency of it. Evans ascribes the principal cause of the monstrous behavior required of its organizers to their “visceral hatred of Jews,” but the word “visceral” tends to beg the question. How was anti-Semitism, so patently false in all its ages of activity, able to lodge itself in so many minds and thereafter weaken—no, remove—their moral character? How, in general, do people become slaves of foolish ideologies, support them with treasure, allegiance, and time, and act, at their behest, so vilely, so contrary to their own interest? History is full of absurdities masquerading as absolutes. Like whooping cough, beliefs get to children early, make their symptoms chronic, hold out useless hopes, and offer vain excuses. It is reason’s business to disbelieve, but the voices of reason have as much effect here as frogs in a swamp.