A Temple of Texts

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays-his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of "healthy dissidents, " among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez.
In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("A lightning bolt, " Gass writes. "Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.") .