"Fiction and the Figures of Life" by William H. Gass (1971)

I suppose if you have no interest in how literature is created, there's no reason for you to read this book, a collection of essays and book reviews straddling literature and philosophy. But there's something so thrilling about his writing style, to me, it's a bit of a shame if people don't experience it at least once. The best, most succinct way I can describe it is: it doesn't ever feel cheap, or chintzy or mass produced or even triple-gilded, overadorned, and when you run into writing that doesn't feel cheap your awareness of the sheer amount of cheap writing that surrounds our lives actually begins to feel overwhelming, in a somewhat suffocating way. And! If you happen to already have an interest in how literature is created, what you'll find are a number of stunning insights, too many to list, often philosophically spiked, that avoids aphorism, grandiloquence, inspirational cant, or even equivocation—you really get the impression of a person who's very thoroughly thought through something in an attempt to get as close as possible to the heart of the heart of his subject (he's basically what David Foster Wallace would be if David Foster Wallace were actually as intelligent as he taught himself to sound.) And if that seems somewhat trite—praising someone for actually thinking deeply about something before writing it down—again, you come out of the book feeling like that kind of approach, for whatever reason, isn't actually valued by anyone with a pen. After all, putting on a cheap show, as we've all seen by now, is a fairly easy thing for anyone and their mother to do. Five stars.