Agape Agape (Penguin Classics)

Agape Agape (Penguin Classics)

William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction. "An exalted, paranoid outcry, a last wounded proclamation of the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art." ( The New York Times Book Review ) "Gaddis's final novel is perhaps his most poignant." ( Los Angeles Times) William Gaddis (1922-1998) was a master of the American novel who was frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Pynchon. Two of his novels, J R and A Frolic of His Own , won the National Book Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize.