| Temple of Texts: Essays Contributor(s): Gass, William H. (Essay by) |
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ISBN: 1564784681 ISBN-13: 9781564784681 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press OUR PRICE: $16.16 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2007 Annotation: 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 Garci a Ma rquez. 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." ) . . . Ben Jonson' s "The Alchemist" (" A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much." ) . . . Gustave Flaubert' s letters (" Here I learned-- and learned-- and learned." ) And after reading Malory' s "Le Morte d' Arthur," Gass writes " I began to eat books like an alien worm." In the concluding essay, " Evil, " Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural valuesthat are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best. As Gass writes, " The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words." "A Temple of Texts" is Gass at his most alchemical. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Collections | Essays |
| Dewey: 814.54 |
| LCCN: 2007026645 |
| Physical Information: 1.23" H x 5.58" W x 8.5" (1.21 lbs) 418 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, "A Temple of Texts" is the latest critical collection from one of America's greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H. Gass pays homage to the readerly side of the literary experience by turning his critical sensibility upon all the books that shaped his own development as a reader, writer, and human being. With essays on figures ranging from William Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein to Flann O'Brien and Robert Burton, Gass creates a "temple" of readerly devotion, a collection of critical explorations as brilliant and incisive as readers have come to expect from this literary master, but also a surprisingly personal window into the author's own literary development. |