Search results for ""Author Joseph Epstein""

Who invented the personal essay? That is hard to say. The ancient Roman philosopher and cynical power broker, Seneca? The 16th century French philosopher Montaigne certainly brought it to a peak of perfection. There were many 19th century masters, not so many after that. Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? That requires no debate at all. It is unquestionably Joseph Epstein. He is not only the best living essayist; he is right up there in the company of Seneca and Montaigne, but one of our own, living in our era and dealing with our pleasures and travails. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. Epstein reads omnivorously and brings us the best of what he reads, passages that we would never have found on our own. How easy it is today, in the digital age, drowning in emails and other ephemera, to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose. Like any master essayist, however, this one brings us more than the shared experience of a lifetime of reading. He brings us himself, alternately scolding and charming, sparkling and deep, buoyant and sad, zany and wise, rebellious and conservative, bookworm and sports fan, clever and everyman, debunker and preservationist, deep into high culture, deep into low culture, curious, fresh, and settled in his ways. This is the friend we all wish we could have, the ideal, humane companion who is completely comfortable in his own human skin. Like Plutarch, he gives us life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is pure pleasure.

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In this collection, his twenty-fifth book, Joseph Epstein departs from writing about literature and culture to indulge his fondness for the world of sport in all its forms. In these essays and stories on such subjects as saving Joe DiMaggio’s reputation from the clutches of an iconoclastic biographer, marveling at the skills of Michael Jordan, shaking free of an addiction to radio sports talk shows, or contemplating the changing nature of the games he grew up with and played as a boy, Epstein turns writing about sports into an art at once penetrating and highly amusing.

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Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Joseph Epstein would surely be at the top of anybody's list. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. Joseph Epstein's Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays is the third volume of essays from Axios Press following the much acclaimed Essays in Biography, 2012 and A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014. It contains 142 short essays, literary sprints rather than marathons. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of "contemporary nuttiness." After reading Epstein, we see life with a fresh eye. We also see ourselves a little more clearly. This is what Plutarch intended: life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is just pure pleasure.

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In this brief but highly engaging book Joseph Epstein argues for the primacy of fiction, and specifically of the novel, among all intellectual endeavors that seek to describe the behavior of human beings. Reading superior fiction, he holds, arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does. He shows how the novel at its best operates above the level of ideas in favor of taking up the truths of the heart. No other form probes so deeply into that eternal mystery of mysteries, human nature, than does the novel. Along the way, Epstein recounts how we read fiction differently than much else we read. He sets out how memory works differently in the reading of fiction than in that of other works. He notes that certain novels are best read at certain ages, and suggests that novels, like movies, might do well to carry ratings, with some novels best read no later than one’s early twenties, others not to be read before the age of forty.The knowledge one acquires from reading novels differs from all other kinds of knowledge, for the subject of all superior fiction is human existence itself, in all its variousness and often humbling confusion. The spirit of the novel entails questioning much that others consider home truths. This is demonstrated by the fact that so many important philosophers, social scientists, jurists, and other intellectuals have been devoted readers of fiction, among them Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Michael Oakeshott, Edward Shils, and Clifford Geertz.The Novel, Who Needs It? takes up those current elements in the culture that militate against the production of first-rate fiction. Prominent among them are the rise of online reading, the expansion of creative writing programs, the artistically discouraging effects of political correctness, and the pervasiveness of therapeutic thinking throughout contemporary culture. As for the title, The Novel, Who Needs It?, Joseph Epstein’s answer is that we all do.

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A portrait of America’s most graceful and elegant male dancer and how he came to represent the essence of style, suavity, and charm Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire investigates the great dancer’s magical talent, taking up the story of his life, his personality, his work habits, his modest pretensions, and above all his accomplishments. Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, Fred Astaire provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist and how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, paradoxically, of democratic aristocracy.Tracing Astaire’s life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late eighties in Hollywood, the book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern all delighted in composing for Astaire), and his many movie dance partners, among them Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Betty Hutton. A key chapter of the book is devoted to Astaire’s somewhat unwilling partnership with Ginger Rogers, the woman with whom he danced most dazzlingly. What emerges from these pages is a fascinating view of an American era, seen through the accomplishments of Fred Astaire, an unassuming but uncompromising performer who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.

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The estimable Joseph Epstein—essayist, past editor of The American Scholar, and recipient of the 2003 National Humanities Medal along with Hal Holbrook and John Updike—brings together twenty short stories in his first such collection since 2010. Most, though not all, of the stories are set in Epstein’s hometown of Chicago, but otherwise they have a variety of subjects: among the titles are "Dad's Gay," "The Casanova of LaSalle Street," "JDate," "Adultery," "Widow's Pique," "Race Relations," "The Man on Whom Everything Was Lost," "My Five Husbands," and "Second Family." Most are stories about family and friendships.

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Ranging widely across many disciplines, this collection of essays demonstrates a distaste for intellectuals who "run with the intellectual mob", and a deep respect for those who maintain their integrity under great pressure. The collection includes an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work towards addressing its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth, and most controversial, president; an account of the Polish emigre Leopold Labedz's outspoken resistance to communism, and an essay on Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri. Many of these essays have appeared in "The American Scholar", edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.

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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 writing, agreed. The two men had never met, nor had they even spoken over the phone. Their friendship was conducted entirely online. Each week they exchanged e-mails of roughly 2,000 words. They discovered a great many things about each other they hadn’t previously known. They shared, for example, a common birthplace in Chicago, where Raphael was born, though his family moved to England in 1938, and his education after that was exclusively English. Each man belongs to that dolorous fraternity of those who have buried a child. Their literary tastes vary, though not widely, since both grew up admiring the great modernist writers and both had an enduring love for Greek and Roman culture. Both men share a fundamental agreement about what, in artistic and intellectual realms, is serious. Raphael and Epstein are artists who happen also to be intellectuals. The result is that few subjects are off limits to them. They are of an age when they have long ceased to worry about their reputations. Wherever else they may look, it is not over their shoulders. Candor reinforced by comedy is the reigning note of Where Were We? as it was of Distant Intimacy, their earlier volume of e-mail correspondence. Writing about other writers, actors, politics, the movies, intellectual fashions, the writing life, and much else, both men say precisely what they think, and say it in high style. Readers may or may not agree with their strong views, but they will never find their thoughts other than fascinating.

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