Joseph Epstein

An incisive exploration of the cultural practice of gossip defines the phenomenon as an eternal and necessary human enterprise that has evolved to new levels in the Internet age, exploring the ways that gossip has negatively impacted politics and journalism. By the best-selling author of Snobbery.

The Untrivial Pursuit

Gossip

Essays on Writers and Their Lives

Partial Payments

Gathers essays about the writings of Italo Svevo, Ben Hecht, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, and Anthony Burgess

Essays on the Literary Life

Pertinent Players

ألكسي دو توكفيل  المرشد إلى الديموقراطية

The American Version

Snobbery

A collection of forty essays each describe a different individual, including such writers and thinkers as Saul Bellow, George Washington, Adlai Stevenson, and Alfred Kinsey.

Essays in Biography

In a sixth collection of personal essays, the editor of The American Scholar explores such topics as Gershwin, name-dropping, naps, aging, long books, pet peeves, Anglophilia, talent vs. genius, surgery, and more. Reprint.

Narcissus Leaves the Pool

The book discusses the principal theoretical methods and models used for strongly coupled plasmas in physics and astrophysics, engineering, and materials science. It includes experimental results of thermodynamical, transport, and optical properties, and modern methods of generation and diagnostics of strongly coupled plasmas.

Envy

Collects essays about culture, the arts, education, language, and intellectuals.

A Literary Education

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.”

New and Selected Essays

Familiarity Breeds Content

Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Joseph Epstein would surely be at the top of anybody's list. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. Joseph Epstein's Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits is the fifth such volume from Axios Press and contains 58 essays. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of “contemporary nuttiness.” It follows the much-acclaimed Essays in Biography, 2012; A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014; Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays, 2016; and The Ideal of Culture: Essays, 2018. After reading Epstein, we see life with a fresh eye. We also see ourselves a little more clearly. This is what Plutarch intended: life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is just pure pleasure.

A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

Gallimaufry

Divorce, the American Experience

In this collection, his twenty-fifth book, Joseph Epstein departs from writing about literature and culture to indulge his fondness for the world of sport in all its forms. In these essays and stories on such subjects as saving Joe DiMaggio’s reputation from the clutches of an iconoclastic biographer, marveling at the skills of Michael Jordan, shaking free of an addiction to radio sports talk shows, or contemplating the changing nature of the games he grew up with and played as a boy, Epstein turns writing about sports into an art at once penetrating and highly amusing.

Essays and Stories on Sport

Masters of the Games

Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor and spite--all cluster at the center of envy. Envy clouds thought, writes Joseph Epstein, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, he concludes, only envy is no fun at all. Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of the many faces of envy. He considers what great thinkers--such as John Rawls, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche--have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude ("a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions"); and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth (or as the title of Epstein's chapter on youth has it, "The Young, God Damn Them"). He looks at resentment in academia, where envy is mixed with snobbery, stirred by impotence, and played out against a background of cosmic injustice; and he offers a brilliant reading of Othello as a play more driven by Iago's envy than Othello's jealousy. He reveals that envy has a strong touch of malice behind it--the envious want to destroy the happiness of others. He suggests that envy of the astonishing success of Jews in Germany and Austria may have lurked behind the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis. As he proved in his best-selling Snobbery, Joseph Epstein has an unmatched ability to highlight our failings in a way that is thoughtful, provocative, and entertaining. If envy is no fun, Epstein's Envy is truly a joy to read.

The Seven Deadly Sins

The American author presents a collection of essays on such topics as his father, his years as a teacher, analysis of the work of writers from Paul Valâery to Truman Capote, and observations on such cultural critics as Harold Bloom and George Steiner.

Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage

In a Cardboard Belt!

Frederic Raphael

DIV This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have never met, nor even spoken to each other. But what is most rare about this book is the authors' abundant talent for entertaining their readers, as much when the topic is grave as when it is droll. Raphael and Epstein agree to embark on a year-long correspondence, but other rules are few. As the weeks progress, their friendship grows, and each inspires the other. Almost any topic, large or small, is considered: they write of schooling, parents, wives, children, literary tastes, enmities, delights, and beliefs. They discuss their professional lives as writers, their skills or want of them, respective experiences with editors, producers, and actors, and, in priceless passages scattered throughout the letters, they assess such celebrated figures as Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Annie Leibowitz, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Harold Pinter, Isaiah Berlin, George Weidenfeld, and Robert Gottlieb, among many others. Epstein and Raphael capture a year in their letters, but more, they invite us into an intimate world where literature, cinema, and art are keys to self-discovery and friendship. /div

A Friendship in the Age of the Internet

Distant Intimacy

Profiles of 25 great writers whose works help us see the world in new ways.

25 Classic Writers who Define English & American Literature

Literary Genius

Provides practical advice on breaking down the implementation and deployment of voice mobility networks within the office, across the campus, and on the road. Offers a complete primer on enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking for voice mobility at scale, whether as a single-mode or dual-mode network, including information on the newest 802.11n standard and how these standards directly impact voice mobility. Includes methods of integrating existing or new VoIP networks with 3G+, CDMA 2000, WCDMA, HSPA, and WiMAX cellular networks using fixed/mobile convergence (FMC). This book provides a comprehensive examination of IP-based voice mobility, covering every step in deploying multimodal voice mobility networks. Each segment of the entire voice mobility solution is described with an eye towards the inherent problems of high-scale mobility, from wired infrastructure to end device, across multiple networks and technologies. Voice mobility is introduced and defined at a basic level before the book examines the high-level components of a scalable voice mobility solution. Chapters focus on several types of transport networks in greater depth, including voice quality metrics and testing, high-density enterprise Wi-Fi voice networks, cellular networks, and high-level networking technologies. The security of VoIP networks is also considered. The book explores standalone VoIP networks and finally provides an investigation of the current and upcoming set of fixed/mobile convergence approaches. This book is an invaluable guide for anyone looking towards voice mobility as a solution to real-world business problems: IT managers and executives looking to understand the potential for converting offices to all-wireless; network designers and architects planning on rolling out a fully-mobile voice network; and administrators operating or troubleshooting voice mobility networks. Provides practical advice on breaking down the implementation and deployment of voice mobility networks within the office, across the campus, and on the road. Offers a complete primer on enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking for voice mobility at scale, whether as a single-mode or dual-mode network, including information on the newest 802.11n standard and how these standards directly impact voice mobility. Includes methods of integrating existing or new VoIP networks with 3G+, CDMA 2000, WCDMA, HSPA, and WiMAX cellular networks using fixed/mobile convergence (FMC).

Integration and Deployment

Scalable VoIP Mobility

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first foreigners to recognize and trumpet the grandness of the American project. His two-volume classic, Democracy in America, published in 1835, offered not only a vivid account of the still young nation but famously predicted what the nation would become, and firmly established his place in U.S. history. Yet in his own time, Tocqueville had little evidence for the truth of his ideas. Introspective, sickly, prone to self-doubt, he was a most unlikely visionary. In wry, elegant prose, Joseph Epstein, America's most versatile essayist, offers an engaging and altogether human portrait of the Frenchman who would become an American icon.

Democracy's Guide

Alexis De Tocqueville

A latest collection of short tales by the author of Fabulous Small Jews features everyday Jewish men in Chicago who confront life-defining moments during complex love affairs, unspoken rivalries and family triumphs.

Joseph Epstein

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