Familiarity Breeds Content

“Consistently entertaining … whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“His sense of humor lingers on every page. He loves wordplay, a funny anecdote, a clever retort. He doesn’t fear intellectual roughhousing.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[Epstein’s] published more than 30 books, and you can’t do that unless you’ve made a lot of readers happy.”
—The New York Times
“His dry sense of humor is in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh and is unmatched today… . How fortunate we are to have Joseph Epstein.”
—National Review
“When I first began to read his essays, and later his stories, I told myself that I would give two fingers to be able to write that well.”
—The Washington Free Beacon
“Whatever the topic, he delivers — big time.”
—Bruce Bawer, The American Spectator

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.

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