22 may 2013

William Gass [Reading William Gass]

William Gass's "Fifty Literary Pillars" from A Temple of Texts:

1. Plato's Timaeus

2. Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics
3. Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War
4. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil
5. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
7. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
9. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’architecte
10. Sir Thomas Malory’s Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
11. Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Burial
12. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
13. Virginia Woolf’s Selected Diaries
14. Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade's End (the Tietjens tetralogy)
15. William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
16. Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist
17. James Joyce’s Ulysses
18. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
19. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
20. Beckett’s How It Is
21. Beckett’s Ping
22. José Lezama’s Paradiso
23. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch
24. Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths
25. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
26. Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor and Other Stories
27. Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers
28. Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno
29. Italo Svevo’s Zeno's Conscience (in William Weaver’s marvelous recent translation)
30. Gustave Flaubert’s Letters
31. Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet
32. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black
33. Colette’s Break of Day
34. John Donne’s Poems and Sermons
35. Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns
36. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés
37. Ezra Pound’s Personae
38. William Butler Yeat’s The Tower
39. Wallace Steven’s Harmonium
40. Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
41. Henry James’s Notebooks
42. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
43. Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider
44. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives
45. William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
46. John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig
47. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
48. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
49. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
50. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters
51. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams

I wish Gass would will me his library . . .