William Gass was one of American literature's most demanding and rewarding prose stylists, and A Temple of Texts collects his essays on reading, writing, and the books that shaped him. Gass, who died in 2017, spent sixty years as a philosophy professor while producing fiction and criticism of extravagant verbal beauty. These essays range from meditations on Rilke and Gertrude Stein to defenses of difficulty and attacks on commercial publishing. Gass believed that literature existed not to communicate ideas or tell stories but to create verbal objects of beauty, sentences that reward attention to their sound and structure. He wrote about reading as a physical and sensory experience, describing how books accumulate meaning through rereading, how marginalia records a relationship, how a library represents a life. The essays are performances as much as arguments, demonstrating in their own prose the pleasures they describe. Gass can be funny, cantankerous, and excessive; he never opts for the direct path when elaboration offers more opportunities for beauty. Readers who find much contemporary prose thin and interchangeable will discover in Gass an advocate for difficulty and density. The book serves as both an introduction to an underappreciated master and a reading list of works Gass loved.