Authors: Joseph Epstein (Editor), Epstein
ISBN-13: 9780393036541, ISBN-10: 0393036545
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Date Published: March 1997
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Joseph Epstein has been the editor of the American Scholar since 1975. His own books of essays include The Middle of My Tether, Once More Around the Block, A Line Out for a Walk, Pertinent Players, and With My Trousers Rolled (all published by Norton). He was guest editor for Best American Essays (1993) and teaches at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Some fifty of the finest personal essays selected by the man often hailed as the "premier essayist of our time."
In his introduction, Epstein contends that "whatever the ostensible subject of a personal essay, at bottom the true subject is the author of the essay." Maybe so, but the degree to which this is true varies greatly in this 53-piece collection. Mark Twain's confessions of faking his way through Italian, Truman Capote's rhapsodic recollections about Tangier ("hemmed with hills, confronted by the sea, and looking like a white cape draped on the shores of Africa") and Annie Dillard's account of an encounter with a weasel show the writers to be, respectively, amusing, passionate and thought-provoking. But personally speaking, those essays aren't on the same level as Eudora Welty's memories of childhood excursions to the neighborhood store, Rebecca West's engrossing tracing of her desire to "contemplate character" to an adolescent visit with her boorish godmother and John Gregory Dunne's touching piece about his daughter. Anyone expecting an anthology devoted to personal confessions and intimate glimpses into lives of their authors is bound to be disappointed by Epstein's occasionally off- track selection. He certainly knows what makes a good essay, being himself a fine essayist (With My Trousers Rolled, etc.), but he is also editor of the American Scholar and drew a disproportionate number of the more expository entries (five) from that publication. (Feb.)
The Personal Essay: A Form of Discovery | 11 | |
Italian without a Master | 25 | |
Something Defeasible | 32 | |
Joseph Conrad | 38 | |
A Chance Meeting | 43 | |
The Dream | 62 | |
Reflections on Journalism | 72 | |
Leslie Stephen | 77 | |
A Visit to a Godmother | 83 | |
St. Augustine and the Bullfight | 91 | |
The Middle or Blue Period | 103 | |
A Preface to Persius | 107 | |
Sleeping and Waking | 113 | |
What Are You Doing in My Dreams? | 118 | |
Once More to the Lake | 125 | |
How It Feels to Be Colored Me | 132 | |
In Quest of Beer | 137 | |
Revisiting Greece | 146 | |
"The Moon under Water" | 153 | |
A Good Appetite | 157 | |
Chic - English, French, and American | 175 | |
The Lost Childhood | 180 | |
The Stranger | 186 | |
The Angry Winter | 189 | |
The Flaw | 192 | |
The Little Store | 202 | |
An Author's Mail | 211 | |
Notes on Punctuation | 228 | |
Living with Music | 232 | |
My Father | 242 | |
Jury Duty | 251 | |
Tangier | 255 | |
Stranger in the Village | 263 | |
How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone | 276 | |
The King of the Birds | 282 | |
The Lesson of the Master | 293 | |
Cops and Writers | 300 | |
The Vanishing Act | 313 | |
Take the "A" Train | 321 | |
Quintana | 329 | |
In the Middle of the Journey | 336 | |
The Bull on the Mountain | 342 | |
On Keeping a Notebook | 359 | |
I Like a Gershwin Tune | 367 | |
The Bey | 383 | |
Tools of Torture | 387 | |
Ron Her Son | 392 | |
Going Home Again | 408 | |
Living Like Weasels | 422 | |
The Inheritance of Tools | 427 | |
Grown Men | 436 | |
Oyez a Beaumont | 443 | |
On Being Black and Middle Class | 449 | |
Mother Tongue | 462 | |
Biographical Notes | 469 | |
Credits | 474 |