Reading an essay by Joseph Epstein is much like watching Joe DiMaggio hit a pitched ball: the pleasure is in watching a difficult art performed with matchless grace and ease. In Life Sentences, his fourth collection of literary essays, Epstein considers the lives and works of nineteen writers of note, appreciating many of them, roughing up some others, and overall weighing them in the very finely calibrated balance of his well-stocked mind. His subjects include Michel de Montaigne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Mary McCarthy, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Robert Lowell, John Dos...
Reading an essay by Joseph Epstein is much like watching Joe DiMaggio hit a pitched ball: the pleasure is in watching a difficult art performed wit...
Writing as a memoirist, polemicist, literary critic, and amused observer of contemporary culture, the author of Snobbery and Friendship presents this engaging collection of essays that captures his witty, entertaining responses to the richness and variety of life.
Writing as a memoirist, polemicist, literary critic, and amused observer of contemporary culture, the author of Snobbery and Friendship presents this ...
Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Alexis de Tocqueville dissects the legacy of the celebrated cultural observer. Joseph Epstein, distinguished literary historian and author of the bestselling Snobbery: The American Version, provides a fresh account of the celebrated writer's classic travels in America, and compares what de Tocqueville witnessed to the current state of our nation.
Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Alexis de Tocqueville dissects the legacy of the celebrated cultural observer. Joseph Epstein, di...
In his first collection of stories since Fabulous Small Jews, Joseph Epstein delivers all the pleasures his readers have come to expect: stories of ordinary men confronting the moments that define a life, told with the bittersweet humor and loving irony encompassed in the title of the book. These fourteen tales map a very particular world Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who happens to possess a standup comic...
In his first collection of stories since Fabulous Small Jews, Joseph Epstein delivers all the pleasures his readers have come to expect: sto...
Gossip is no trivial matter; despite its reputation, Epstein argues, it is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World, along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed from its old-fashioned best clever, mocking, a great private pleasure to a corrosive new-school version, thanks to the reach of the mass media and the Internet. Written in his trademark erudite and witty style, Gossip captures...
Gossip is no trivial matter; despite its reputation, Epstein argues, it is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a mas...
Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other's various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael's...
Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary ...
