Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life

“Playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Discursive, learned, often funny and always satisfying.” —The Wall Street Journal“Very lucky for us is that we have Joseph Epstein and all his brilliant writings. Read them, buy the books, and buy his memoir.” —Forbes“the one thing we know most certainly about Joseph Epstein, who at age 87 is still adding to an oeuvre of truly remarkable dimensions and consistently high merit, is that taste is the guy’s middle name.” —Bruce Bawer, The American Spectator“[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“[Epstein] is that rarest of beings—the serious man who doesn’t take himself too seriously.” —National Review“Epstein’s books are really long essays, and his essays in turn follow the logic of anecdotes, a form that he has mastered better than anyone I have ever read.” —The Washington Free Beacon“Great good luck I’d call this [book], both for Epstein and for his readers. —The American Spectator

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.