A Literary Education and Other Essays

March 31, 2014
Epstein follows up Essays in Biography (2012) with another collection of provocative and beguiling thought pieces. The six selections grouped under “Memoir” comprise an informal autobiography that takes the author from his Chicago boyhood to his current life as an obit-reading septuagenarian. In one of the book’s best essays, “A Virtucrat Remembers,” Epstein relates how the liberal advances of the ‘60s turned him off liberalism; he dismantles a polemic against neoconservativism that was published in Dissent in 1973—only to reveal that he was the angry young man who wrote it. A number of these essays grow out of omnivorous reading. From books about the rising popularity of plastic surgery, Epstein deduces that plastic surgeons combine “the work of a sawbones with that of a shrink”—hence the essay’s title “Prozac, with Knife.” The range of his curiosity is exhilarating: he writes as insightfully on art critic Hilton Kramer and the New York Review of Books as he does on higher education and, in “What to Do About the Arts”—inspired by his years serving on the National Endowment for the Arts—on the decline of artistic standards in contemporary America. Though they span nearly 40 years, the essays are remarkable for their consistency of tone and abundant insights about fiction, poetry, philosophy, and sociology. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt Inc.

April 1, 2014
A curmudgeonly cultural critic collects a potpourri of his pieces from the past 30 years, most from Commentary and the Weekly Standard. Prolific essayist, biographer and novelist Epstein (Essays in Biography, 2012, etc.) never leaves readers wondering about much. He delivers fierce punches to the guts of all sorts here: writers he doesn't care for (Updike, Mailer, Morrison, Vidal, Roth, Rich--both Frank and Adrienne), practices he abhors in higher education (the death of the liberal arts, emphases on feminism and Marxism and various other -isms in the literature curriculum), publications he doesn't like (the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review), child-rearing practices he disdains (contained in a wild essay called "The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin"), poetry he doesn't like and sentences he hates. Such a collection inevitably leads to some repetition, so readers hear a few times about his college days (the University of Illinois, his transfer to the University of Chicago), his early days of being a liberal, his peacetime service in the military and his conversion to conservatism--a transformation occasioned in major part by the excesses of the 1960s and '70s. Epstein does not often communicate any sense of uncertainty; he dispenses opinions and decisions with all the conviction of a judge on an afternoon TV show. Things are so, he seems to say, because I declare them so. Still, his pieces inevitably entertain as well as educate--and/or annoy). He eviscerates Paul Goodman, some colleagues at Northwestern University (where he taught for decades), Maya Angelou and Spike Lee, and he declares that Dreiser and Cather surpass any subsequent American novelists. He also blasts the National Endowment for the Arts (he served the agency for a bit). Lots of erudition and bloody (right-ish) fun.

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July 1, 2014

Four years ago, Axios Press approached Epstein (Snobbery; The Goldin Boys) about publishing any of his essays that had not previously appeared in book form and that he deemed worth resurrecting. Essays in Biography came out in 2012. Epstein, a prolific writer and author of 24 books and essay collections, here presents 38 additional pieces. They display his virtues as a polemicist: opinions that are strongly held and wittily presented, and a take-no-hostages approach to whatever arouses his ire. The topics are roughly: growing up in Chicago, the ills afflicting society and culture today, the parlous state of the academy and the arts, and his opinion of certain journals (mostly liberal) and people. A good place to start is Epstein's essay on Walter Cronkite, which is highly critical of the iconic newscaster. The author's general take on liberals is less appealing, not because what he says is wrong, but because his targets are so obvious. Nonetheless, Epstein always gets the mind stirring and there are few better reads than these essays. There's a place in society for gadflies--Epstein's an exemplary one. VERDICT These lively works will appeal mostly to lovers of essays. Though Epstein slams the New Yorker, readers of that magazine are among the ones who will enjoy him.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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