Throughout his career, William Gass relentlessly pushed at the boundaries of language, celebrating the music of the sentence and the aesthetics of the written w

"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omen

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Crit

"Gass has produced a book that burrows inside us then wails like a beast, a book that mainlines a century's terror direct to the brain."--Voice Literary Supplem

Joseph Skizzen's family fled from Austria in 1938 to London where his father disappeared, he and his family then relocated to small town Ohio and Joseph grows u