Carpenter's Gothic (1985) is the third chamber fugue novel by William Gaddis (1922–1998) and the first publication of the works of the outstanding American writer in Russian. The title of the novel reflects the name of an architectural fashion common in the American South—wooden “knockoffs” of Victorian stone mansions. Carpenter Gothic takes place almost entirely inside such a house, but as Cynthia Ozick noted in her insightful review, "Gaddis is like a flood" and makes up for its lack of artistic territory with a virtuoso command of all the nuances and registers of the English language, satire and tension created by almost a continuous dialogue of people unable to resist their own egoism and the simulations of the world around them. In 1986, the novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, awarded to the best American prose.