Familiarity breeds content : new and selected essays Cover Image

Book

Familiarity breeds content : new and selected essays / Joseph Epstein ; [with a forword by Christopher Buckley].

Epstein, Joseph, 1937- (author.). Buckley, Christopher, 1952- (writer of foreword.).

Summary:

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."

Record details

ISBN: 1668009722
ISBN: 9781668009727
Physical Description: xiii, 441 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition.
Publisher: New York, NY : Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2024.
Copyright: ©2024

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:

Selected essays. Jokes and their relation to the conscious -- A man of letters -- Balls-up -- But I generalize -- Work and its contents -- This sporting life -- A former good guy and his friends -- A fat man struggles to get out -- Tea and antipathy -- An older dude -- You probably don't know me -- Short subject -- Smoke gets in your eyes -- The man in the green hat -- A few kind words for envy -- Waiter, there's a paragraph in my soup! -- Livestock -- A bonfire of my vanities -- Hair piece -- Nicely out of it -- New essays. The bookish life -- Learning Latin -- Living in a cathouse -- Good grief -- Taste: What is it? Who needs it? How do you acquire it?