By William H. Gass
ISBN: 9781628976366
eBook: 9781628976373
Audiobook: 9781628976380
Publication date: April 7, 2026
The Tunnel, William H. Gass’ colossal second novel, appeared on the literary scene in 1995, after three decades at the typewriter.
The Tunnel was hailed by many as an indisputable masterpiece, reviled by others as a suffocating and overwhelming experiment, and has been voraciously studied by readers ever since. The story of a middle-aged history professor who, upon nearing completion of his magnum opus, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany," finds himself implicated in his own research, and begins to write a parallel work of history: his own life’s story. Fearing that someone might find these confessional pages, he begins to dig a tunnel out from beneath his home in an attempt to hide, or escape, from the past that he has so diligently cataloged.
The Tunnel is many things: an awe-inspiring and apocalyptic novel that reckons with the accumulating brutality of the twentieth century; a mirror, asking readers to confront their own potential for darkness; and the crowning achievement by one of America’s great prose stylists.
To celebrate this highly anticipated reissue, Dalkey Archive Press is launching a new companion, The Tunnel Reader, featuring archival essays by writers in addition to new critical essays.
This companion reader further supplements the existing casebook, which is available for free download here, juxtaposing The Tunnel’s critical reception in 1995 with its enduring legacy and eerie sense of timeliness in our modern political moment.
The unabridged audiobook of The Tunnel, read by William Gass himself, will also be re-released on April 7th, 2026.
Both the Reader and the audiobook are available for pre-order now, or as a bundle with pre-order of The Tunnel.
Biographical Information
William H. Gass (1924-2017) was an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He graduated from Kenyon College and received his PhD at Cornell University. He taught philosophy at both Purdue University and at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities. In 1990, Gass founded the International Writers Center (now known as the Center for the Humanities) and served as its director until his retirement in 2000.
Reviews
"The masterpiece . . . of this 70-year-old American master. . . . The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. . . . The rhythmic pressure of its language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in lis novel! ... We revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things live with interest."—Robert Kelly, New York Times Book Review
“Gass allows his narrator to make a world within words, for the concerns of this novel's prose re both poetic and encyclopedic. . . . Gass's prose is as musical and inventive as ever."—Philip Graham, Chicago Tribune
“Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark, with an obsessiveness bordering on Brodskey baroque. The eye can't rest, nor the mind mist. . . . Gass has written a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel."—John Leonard, Nation