The Recognitions.

GADDIS, William.

$2,500.00

Item Number: 144184

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955.

First edition of the author’s masterpiece. Thick octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by William Gaddis on the half-title page. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing "Catch-22" and "V.," managed to anticipate the spirit of both"--"The Recognitions" is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us. The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005.