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William Gass at The Millions

William Gass is included in the “A Year in Reading” feature at The Millions. He writes about Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins. An excerpt:

Macaulay does everything well, but scarcely does one of her pages pass than she has quoted from another and let those words fall into her own concoction like just the right addition to the dish. This quality – to let her work make way for another writer’s beauty – she manifests as early as page one. She has mentioned that among the pleasures of ruins must be some vindictive ones. I still remember the kid in kindergarten who kicked over my house of blocks, and his glee at my distress and his accomplishment. In the sentence and the quotation that follows she reveals her own love of lists, but I also have to marvel at the lovely dance of ideas, of past time elevating the present, that takes place upon the floor of her prose.

Read the rest HERE. And check out entries by Stephen Elliott, David Shields, Nick Flynn, Rosecrans Baldwin, Dana Goodyear, Victor LaValle, and Reif Larsen.

  • John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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