Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelists.

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis s collected nonfiction and his final novel and Jonathan Franzen s lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis s reputation: Gaddis s unique hybridity, his ability to write in the gap between two dispensations, between...

William Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels--"The Recognitions," "JR," "Carpenter's Gothic," and "A Frolic of His Own"--are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays. As these essays testify, few American writers have illuminated as poignantly or incisively just how much the systemic forces of capitalism and mass communication have impacted individual lives and identity--imparting global dimensions to private pursuits and...