Life Sentences: Literary Essays

Reading an essay by Joseph Epstein is much like watching Joe DiMaggio hit a pitched ball: the pleasure is in watching a difficult art performed with matchless grace and ease. In Life Sentences, his fourth collection of literary essays, he considers the lives and works of nineteen writers of note, appreciating many of them, roughing up some others, and weighing them overall in the finely calibrated balance of his well-stocked mind.