fictions present

Scott Zieher offers some creative non-fiction in praise of perhaps Gaddis’s least-lauded publication: the lavishly illustrated and sample-provisioned “masterwork of printed ephemera” A Pile Fabric Primer. How did this mysterious document come to be, and what does it tell us about the creative writer's working conditions?

This roundtable discussion of translating William Gaddis's fiction, with Spanish translator Mariano Peyrou, Portugese translator Francine Osaki, and Ukrainian translator Max Nestelieiev, took place online on September 3rd 2023. Russian translator Sergey Karpov and Japanese translator Yoshihiko Kihara, unable to join on that day, sent written responses to some of the roundtable questions, which have been incorporated below where the relevant question was asked. The transcript has been reviewed, annotated, and lightly edited for clarity and cohesion by roundtable moderator, Marie Fahd.

Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, applies her expertise in legal theory to Gaddis’s penultimate novel. Following discussions on business law and the controversial notion of corporate personhood, Siraganian reads Gaddis's fourth novel to explore how a business-dominated legal culture transforms our conceptions and narratives of the individual person.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon slides between the sun and the Earth, aligned precisely so that the lunar body appears to block the solar surface entirely from view. In this autobiographical essay, Steve Tomasula, an Illinois-based writer known for collaborative image-text assemblages, from TOC to Ascension, that convey how and why humans’ existential sense of reality can vary so radically across time and space, recalls an April 2017 Midwestern road-trip pursuing the path of the total eclipse. In Tomasula’s account of the totality, the multiple meditations surrounding this predictable celestial event only intensify the sublimity of the shared experience and its disruptive systemic effects.

This roundtable discussion took place online in August 2023: it has been lightly edited for focus and clarity. The Chair was Ali Chetwynd, with Jeff Bursey, Victoria Harding, Chad Post, Edwin Turner, Chris Via as speakers. More about each participant, including links to their individual projects, can be found in their electronic book review author biographies.

Rochelle Gold brings Gaddis’s early critique of mid-century capitalism into contact with current criticism by Alan Liu and others, who suggest that humanists must bring their own questions, interests, and values to the table, rather than acquiescing to the economic logic of post-industrialism.

Jon Fain studied creative writing with William Gaddis at Bard College between 1976 and 1978, during Gaddis’s first university teaching job. It didn’t go perfectly, as Fain discusses in this retrospective, which includes a letter of Gaddis’s writing-feedback.

A personal recitation of Paul Ingendaay's career as a "lifelong" associate editor with the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Ingendaay also shares with us a recollection of the slow, belated but definitive situation of Gaddis's lifework in the German literary canon.

Mark Madigan shares a photograph of William Gaddis, captured by John Puleio, during one of his largely improvised lectures.

Written by William Gaddis in the mid-1940s, “Faire Exchange No Robbery” is a short, mock-Elizabethan play in verse, about early poetry anthologies and the death of Christopher Marlowe. Jeffrey Severs brings this unpublished document to light, finding in it the germ of Gaddis’s career-long interests in art’s relationship to commerce, and in the significance of contracts.