In a Cardboard Belt!

Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great Max Bialystock in The Producers Look at me now! Look at me now! Im wearing a cardboard belt! the charming essayist Joseph Epstein gives us his largest and most adventurous collection to date. With his signature gifts of sparkling humor and penetrating intelligence he issues forth as a memoirist polemicist literary critic and amused observer of contemporary culture. In deeply considered examinations of writers from Paul Valry to Truman Capote in incisive take-downs of such cultural pooh-bahs as Harold Bloom and George Steiner and in personally revealing essays about his father and about his years as a teacher this remarkable collection from one of Americas best essayists is a book to be savored.