Joseph Epstein

"Alexis de Tocqueville was the author of two masterpieces, Democracry in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this volume, Alan S. Kahan, one of the world's leading authorities on Tocqueville's work, presents an accessible and rigorous account of the French author's ideas set in the context of his life and times. It sets out the essential tensions and ambiguities in Tocqueville's thought and analyzes the idea that made him such a compelling and insightful thinker."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

In these pages are artists, writers, a commodities trader, a concert pianist, all at various crossroads and turning points in their lives. These are classic stories with universal themes: the rights of talent, the attempt to shake one's identity, the desperation of strangled impulses, the complexities of family love. But as always with Epstein, the magic, the charm, and the humor are in his lavish details. The stories in Fabulous Small Jews are small worlds writ large, and Epstein's observant eye and witty voice bring them alive on the page.

Joseph Epstein's highly entertaining new book takes up the subject of snobbery in America after the fall of the prominence of the old Wasp culture of prep schools, Ivy League colleges, cotillions, debutante balls, the Social Register, and the rest of it. With ample humor and insight, Epstein uncovers the new outlets upon which the old snobbery has fastened: food and wine, fashion, high-achieving children, schools, politics, health, being with-it, name-dropping, and much else, including the roles of Jews and homosexuals in the development of snobbery. He also raises the question of whether snobbery might, alas, be a part of human nature. Snobbery: The American Versionis the first book in English devoted exclusively to the subject since Thackeray's THE BOOK OF SNOBS.

"As the son of a serial killer, homicide detective Thomas 'Veck' DelVecchio, Jr, grew up in the shadow of evil. Now, on the knife-edge between civic duty and blind retribution, he atones for the sins of his father - while fighting his inner demons. Assigned to monitor Veck is Internal Affairs officer Sophia Reilly, whose interest in him is both professional and arousingly personal. And Veck and Sophia have another link: Jim Heron, a mysterious stranger with too many answers ..."--Provided by publisher.

Joseph Epstein's sixth collection of personal pieces rounds off more than two decades of his writing under the name Aristides for The American Scholar. Among the things that arise here are naps, Gershwin, name-dropping, long books, growing older, talent versus genius, Anglophilia, and surgery. These are essays about the head and the heart.

Over the last twenty years Joseph Epstein has published more than eighty familiar essays. Taken together, these essays constitute a continuing autobiography. Although the tone in this collection, his fifth - which owes its title to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - is still highly amused, these new essays also strike a chord that's slightly elegiac. Offering reflections on his increased maturity both as a writer and as a man, Epstein admits to feeling more and more on the periphery of contemporary life - "Nicely Out of It," and not at all minding this. "Decline and Blumenthal" is his take on the endemic slippage of standards in all realms of life. In "Here to Buy Mink," he conveys his love and admiration for the remarkable woman who was his mother. . Other essays deal with the pleasures of middle age, of music and cats and telling anecdotes, of the psychological and social complexities of car ownership, of the oddities and ambiguities of male hair. Urbane yet regularly amazed, ironic yet happily candid, Epstein's essays have long been compared to the conversation of an intelligent friend whose wit takes surprising turns of seriousness. Epstein is one of those writers whose humor, at bottom, is serious.

CHARM is a beautifully illustrated re-telling of the Cinderella story which takes all the much-loved elements of the classic fairytale (the handsome prince, the fairy godmother, the enchanted mouse, the beautiful girl and, of course, the iconic balls) and puts a modern spin on the characters, their motives and their desires.

A juicy, incisive exploration of gossip in all its forms--from celebrity rumors to literary "romans a clef," from personal sniping to political slander.