FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE TUNNEL BY WILLIAM H. GASS RETURNS IN 2026
DALLAS, TX – April 7, 2025 – Dalkey Archive is pleased to confirm the long-awaited republication of William H. Gass’ grand abyss of a novel—The Tunnel. Rumors of a new edition have circulated for several years, and now, at last, The Tunnel will join the Dalkey Archive Essentials series one year from today, on April 7th, 2026. Its publication will be accompanied by the re-release of an audiobook read by William Gass himself, and a new companion reader of both new and archival critical essays.
Readers can pre-order The Tunnel now on the Dalkey Archive website in print and eBook formats.
A novel of staggering ambition and psychological depth, The Tunnel is a quintessential Dalkey Archive title: intricate, allusive, and dense with historical significance. Structured as a novel “in twelve Philippics,” The Tunnel follows William Frederick Kohler, a professor of German history at an unnamed university in the American Midwest, tracing reflections on his childhood, his department colleagues, his married life, and the unsettling implications of his participation in the rising tide of fascist sentiments as an exchange student in 1930s Germany.
Gass’s narrator, Kohler, has made his name as the author of the Nuremberg Notes, a book notorious for its sympathetic views of those on trial for war crimes. In the intervening years, Kohler dedicates himself to completing the manuscript of his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Faced with writer’s block when it comes time to write the preface, he instead begins a confessional memoir that makes up the text of The Tunnel. He hides these pages from his wife between the pages of his academic tome. Realization soon dawns that he has implicated himself in his own thesis—condemned himself with his own life’s work. And so he begins to dig a tunnel out from his basement study. A tunnel in which to hide, or to escape, from the life he has lived.
Critical reception, initially polarizing, has since caught up to the scope of Gass’s ambition. For The New Republic, Robert Alter called the book “a complete compendium of the vices of postmodern writing.” In the Los Angeles Times, Micheal Silverblatt praised “the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.”
Much like Kohler’s own work, The Tunnel is a novel that implicates its readers, forcing us to recognize in ourselves the same potential for depravity we see in Gass’s narrator. Nearly three decades after its initial publication, we look forward to sharing this “bleak, black book, engendering awe and despair” with a new generation of readers, who will find it as chillingly relevant today as it was on its initial publication thirty years ago.
To celebrate this highly anticipated reissue, Dalkey Archive Press is launching a new companion featuring both archival and new critical essays by esteemed writers. The Tunnel Reader will contextualize the 26 years of writing that went into the novel, the book’s initial publication in 1995, and its subsequent reissue in 2026. Over the course of the next year and starting this month, these critical essays will be exclusively released in monthly installments via newsletter, which readers can subscribe to here. Upon the book’s publication in April 2026, The Tunnel Reader will be compiled and published in a print book, which is available for pre-order now, and can be bundled with a pre-order of The Tunnel. This companion reader further supplements the existing casebook, which is available for free download on the Dalkey Archive website, juxtaposing The Tunnel’s critical reception in 1995 with its enduring legacy and eerie sense of timeliness in our modern political moment.
The Tunnel audiobook will also be re-released on April 7th, 2026, to accompany the publication of the book as a Dalkey Archive Press Essential. The unabridged recording of the book, read by William Gass himself and recorded at Clayton Studios in St Louis, through support from Washington University and The Lannan Foundation, is a staggering 44 hours long. An arduous journey all its own, the audiobook will be released simultaneously with the book’s publication, and can be pre-ordered on our website.
For questions, publicity inquiries, or galley requests, please contact Publicity Director Nadine Santoro: nadine@deepvellum.org.
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints, including Dalkey Archive Press, and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.
Dalkey Archive Essentials gathers classics from the Dalkey Archive catalog, highlighting the most influential titles published by the press since its founding in 1980. The most popular and bestselling series of the press, the Essentials series includes such remarkable authors as Gertrude Stein, John Barth, Jon Fosse, Marguerite Young, Djuna Barnes, and Flann O’Brien.
