Familiarity Breeds Content, Joseph Epstein
Familiarity Breeds Content, Joseph Epstein
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Familiarity Breeds Content
New and Selected Essays

Author: Joseph Epstein

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Unabridged: 14 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/16/2024

Synopsis

A collection of personal essays from America’s most revered essay writer, Joseph Epstein.

America’s greatest living essayist writes about life and aging and being all too nicely out of it. In these personal pieces, he takes on topics as varied as grieving for a dead son, learning Latin late in life, and the pleasures of living with cats. Epstein gives us a “bonfire of his own vanities,” his thoughts about why watching sports is so impossibly seductive, what it is like to be short, and why he misses smoking even decades as a health-obsessed non-smoker. Above all, he writes about the literary life and the endless joys that reading and writing have brought to a self-confessed “lucky man.”

About Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the author of thirty-one books, among them works on divorce, ambition, snobbery, friendship, envy, and gossip. He has published seventeen collections of essays and four books of short stories. He has been the editor of the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa, and for thirty years he taught in the English Department at Northwestern University. He has written for The New Yorker, Commentary, New Criterion, Times Literary Supplement, Claremont Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and other magazines both in the United States and abroad. In 2003, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.  

Reviews

Goodreads review by Karen

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Some bits are more enjoyable than others, but this was a good read. Well written!......more

Goodreads review by Michael

This is a greatest hits selection of essays by Epstein over the last forty-five years. Most of them have been previously published in his ten or so volumes of collected essays. It was released at the same time as his recent autobiography. Epstein is my favorite American essayist. His basic technique......more

Goodreads review by Mike

Delicacies galore herein. 18…Letters, 1978. A pessimist doesn’t check his mail. I’m a Pollyanna perpetually aglow & atremble with optimism. 26… Justice Holmes’ letters virile and manly 30… Hate mail * / 35… Balls-up, 1981, juggling 40… Practicing: “A poem is never finished but only abandoned.” -Valery 8......more

Goodreads review by Annabelle

Joseph Epstein never disappoints. If most of the essays, anecdotes, and aphorisms (six times he alludes to my favorite, Somerset Maugham!) quoted here seemed familiar, it's because I have, over the years, read them in his earlier anthologies. Familiarity breeds contentment. And then some! The essays......more

Goodreads review by Al

My admiration for Joseph Epstein goes back to when he was editor of The American Scholar and included one of his amazing familiar essays in every issue. He's still producing new work, but it's great to see some of his finest work from TAS collected in this book. If you haven't been introduced to Mr......more

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