Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Author: Joseph Epstein

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Description

A collection of personal essays from America’s most revered essay writer, Joseph Epstein.

America’s greatest living essayist writes about life and aging and being all too nicely out of it. In these personal pieces, he takes on topics as varied as grieving for a dead son, learning Latin late in life, and the pleasures of living with cats. Epstein gives us a “bonfire of his own vanities,” his thoughts about why watching sports is so impossibly seductive, what it is like to be short, and why he misses smoking even decades as a health-obsessed non-smoker. Above all, he writes about the literary life and the endless joys that reading and writing have brought to a self-confessed “lucky man.”

Critic Reviews

“Consistently entertaining . . . whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“His sense of humor lingers on every page. He loves wordplay, a funny anecdote, a clever retort. He doesn’t fear intellectual roughhousing.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[Epstein’s] published more than 30 books, and you can’t do that unless you’ve made a lot of readers happy.”
—The New York Times
“His dry sense of humor is in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh and is unmatched today. . . . How fortunate we are to have Joseph Epstein.”
—National Review
“When I first began to read his essays, and later his stories, I told myself that I would give two fingers to be able to write that well.”
—The Washington Free Beacon
“Whatever the topic, he delivers — big time.”
—Bruce Bawer, The American Spectator

About the Author

Joseph Epstein is the author of thirty-one books, among them works on divorce, ambition, snobbery, friendship, envy, and gossip. He has published seventeen collections of essays and four books of short stories. He has been the editor of the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa, and for thirty years he taught in the English Department at Northwestern University. He has written for The New Yorker, Commentary, New Criterion, Times Literary Supplement, Claremont Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and other magazines both in the United States and abroad. In 2003, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.