The Recognitions

A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most venerated novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a New England pastor, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of his revered old masters copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who of course sells them as the real thing. Gwyon's story is only one of many that fill the pages of a novel that is as monstrously populated as paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Throughout, Gaddis's characters preen and scheme and party and toil, pursuing salvation through the debasement of desire. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by the critics on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions has gone on to establish itself as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique, a book of freakish strangeness and outrageous comedy that is also profoundly serious and sad. About the Authors A 1982 MacArthur Fellow and two-time winner of the National Book Award, William Gaddis (1922-1998) was the author of five novels- The Recognitions, J R, Carpenter's Gothic, A Frolic of His Own, and posthumously, Agape Agape. His complex, innovative, and intellectually rigorous body of work has long served as a source of inspiration, admiration, and debate for readers and fellow writers alike. William H. Gass (1924-2017) was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and professor of philosophy. NYRB Classics reissued his book-length essay On Being Blue- A Philosophical Inquiry and his short story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country in 2014. Tom McCarthy is the author of four novels - Remainder, Men in Space, C , and Satin Island - and several works of criticism, including a collection of essays, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, which was published in 2017 by New York Review Books. He is the founder and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University. He lives in London.