Customer Reviews

Partial Payments, Essays on Writer's and Their Lives

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Joseph Epstein's collection of essays on various literary figures carries with it two of my favorite virtues: readability and inclusiveness. A book that is readable (or if difficult, rewards the effort, like Faulkner's novels) and that covers all the bases is a joy to find, and "Partial Payments" fits that category nicely. Epstein's basic method is this: read all of a writer's works, a healthy piece of the biographical writings, and then cogitate upon the subject. Each one of Epstein's essays effectively provides an introduction to the writer under scrutiny; each one carries with it a sense of worth and incisive definition of the writer's gifts. Epstein takes for the most part writers who have fallen out of the canon (like H.L. Mencken), or who are no longer read outside of literary history classes (like Theodore Dreiser), or who need fresh views (like E.B. White), and strikes off a portrait in words. Every single one of his essays is worth reading, and most of them have sent me to the local library or Amazon to buy one of the recommended texts. In short, a guidebook to a literary cornucopia of the unjustly forgotten or neglected.