50 Literary Anecdotes from Joseph Epstein
Sit in Your Overstuffed Chair with a Good Pipe and Glimpse Incidents in Our Culture's Literary History
Topic
Joseph Epstein
A collection of 10 issues
Something Tells Me I’d Really Enjoy the Private Letters of Two Men I Didn’t Even Know Existed
It helps to be aware of one’s ignorance.
That’s one reason I like to read Joseph Epstein, who wrote a delightful essay for the current issue of the new Catholic journal, The Lamp that brought my level of awareness to the brim.
The topic?
The letters of George
How to Re-Read
Joseph Epstein at The Lamp
Joseph Epstein's Four Volumes of Mini-Biographies
Joseph Epstein's four volumes of literary mini-biographies:
Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985)
Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (1989)
Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life (1993)
Life Sentences: Literary Essays (1997)
How to Write for Surfer Dudes
I spent last summer, taking digital essay lessons. They were part of a series that I call, “Learning to Write for Morons,” by Medium.com.
I learned a lot, but I can condense the lessons into one premise: If you're writing online articles, you have a split second
The Joseph Epstein/Jill Biden Affair
My man Joseph Epstein made a flash a few years ago with his suggestion that Jill Biden drop the "Dr." from her title while she serves as First Lady.
The uproar was pretty intense. I saw him referred to as a "misogynist," "bigot," and
What's Joe Epstein Been Saying?
A few choice passages from The Ideal of Culture (2018) and Gallimaufry (2020)
The perennial need to be on the cutting edge: "Orwell wrote that liberals fear few things more than being outflanked on the left."
Writing about his undergrad days at the University of Chicago, which was
Epstein Corner
A joke from Joseph Epstein's entertaining essay, “You Could Die Laughing: Are Jewish Jokes a Humorous Subject?”
“Walking along the beach, Goldstein finds a bottle, picks it up, and–surprise! surprise!–a genie emerges. The genie instructs Goldstein that he will grant him one wish, and one wish
Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm's older brother, Herbert, was a funny guy. Once, when a man walked past him groaning under a grandfather clock he was carting on his back, Herbert said, "My good fellow, why not carry a watch?" (Joseph Epstein, Partial Payments).
Print v. Pixel
A new collection of his essays came out in October 2020. I'm enjoying it. Epstein is perfect random-time reading:
The great battle of the day is not the culture war, or the uncivil skirmishes between political parties, but what I think of as the serious conflict between