The Tunnel

William H Gass author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:14th Aug '25

£19.00

This title is due to be published on 14th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The Tunnel cover

  • Print and digital publicity targeting the New Yorker, Harper’s, Paris Review, NPR, New York Times, Bookforum, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, LARB, Literary Hub

  • Campaign emphasizing Dalkey Archive Essentials series

  • New introduction from recognized writer

  • Marketing highlighting author’s past praise

  • Targeted bookseller mailing

  • Promotion/outreach to university English and comparative literature departments, Washington University in St. Louis

  • Virtual and in-person events centered on book’s importance, author’s legacy

  • Promotion on publisher’s website and social media; promotion via e-newsletters to booksellers, reviewers

Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany," finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

"The masterpiece . . . of this 70-year-old American master. . . . The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. . . . The rhythmic pressure of its language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in lis novel! ... We revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things live with interest."—Robert Kelly, New York Times Book Review

“Gass allows his narrator to make a world within words, for the concerns of this novel's prose re both poetic and encyclopedic. . . . Gass's prose is as musical and inventive as ever."—Philip Graham, Chicago Tribune

“Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark, with an obsessiveness bordering on Brodskey baroque. The eye can't rest, nor the mind mist. . . . Gass has written a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel."—John Leonard, Nation

ISBN: 9781628974638

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown