Joseph Epstein
Life Sentences
Literary Essays
Further literary writings by the foremost
practitioner of the informal essay in our time.
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 Passos, Edmund
Wilson, Elizabeth Bishop, Ambrose Bierce, and Philip Larkin.
No overarching theory or grinding ideological ax mars these
finely nuanced readings of writers who matter; as Epstein
writes, "What unites this collection of literary essays is the interest
of the man who wrote them." And what interests him is
excellence in literature.
Few pleasures in life are as dependable as reading a
Joseph Epstein essay. In that sense Life Sentences
is another blue-chip public offering.
"The modern essay has regained a
good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph
Epstein." —Chicago Tribune
Joseph Epstein is the author of eight previous essay
collections, two nonfiction works, and a short story collection. He also edited the recently published Norton Book of Personal
Essays.
His work appears regularly in Commentary, The New
Yorker, the Weekly Standard, and the American
Scholar, of which he is the editor. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
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