Description
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 331, [5] pages. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Signed by the author on the half-title page. Includes A Note on the Title; You Probably Don't Know Me; The Gentle Art of the Resounding Pub-Down; The Bore Wars; Autodidact; Quotations: Confessions of a Low Roller; Calm and Uncollected; Short Subject; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes; "And That's What I Like About the South"; The Man in the Green Hat; A Few Kind Words for Envy; Waiter, There's a Paragraph in My Soup!, Entre Nous; Money Is Funny; and Dancing in the Darts. Essays deal with fame, insults, boredom, teaching, quotations, gamblers, scouting, height, smoking, fate, hats, envy, reading, gossip, money, and illness. Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937) is an American writer who was the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. His essays and stories have appeared in books and other publications. Epstein's works include Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing, published in 1985. Epstein's essay "Who Killed Poetry?", published in Commentary in 1988, generated discussion in the literary community decades after its publication. In 1975, he began serving as the editor of The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society, and wrote for it under the pseudonym "Aristides." He taught writing and literature at Northwestern University. Reading Joseph Epstein sharpens the wits, and heightens one's sense of the richness of life, particularly of its small but essential pleasures. Put another way, as the Washington Times said, "In a just world, Joseph Epstein would make the best-seller lists." Derived from a Kirkus review: The title, American Scholar editor Epstein tells us, is taken from Paul Klee's explanation of his art: ``I take a line out for a walk''-which, Epstein adds, ``describes exactly, precisely, absolutely what I do.'' And so it does, as demonstrated by these congenial essays, which ramble but always attain some sort of destination, or point. Erudite, gleefully self-exposing, Epstein muses here on the allure of fame, the art of the put-down, gambling, envy, the travails of being short, the domination of money, etc. In all: provocative after-dinner chat, with sniftered brandy and boxed cigars at hand. The Publishers Weekly article took a somewhat different take, as this derived portion shows: The ``lines'' that Epstein here takes out for walks are his subjects. Generally they include topics one doesn't encounter on the evening news, such as the etiquette of hats, the stomach needed for bigtime gambling and the author's years at the intensely intellectual University of Chicago--where the average undergraduate struck him as being ``someone from New York who had been reading the New Republic from the age of 11 and decided against going to an Ivy League school because they were all deemed too lightweight.'' His essays vary in complexity of structure, but all move from solitary observation to a larger meditation on life. To reveal more would erode the pleasure of reading Epstein, a writer at the top of his powers in these serious, funny, pleasantly unpredictable musings.
