What can you say about the canonical William Gass? Essayist, novelist, literary critic, he has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations.

You’ll love these brief outtakes from the recording sessions for the audio book of The Tunnel.

Listen to what he says about a duck.

Courtesy of our friends at Dalkey Archive Press, whom I’ve written about before here at the blog.