
Comprises essays about writers works and lives. Those covered by this volume include: Michel de Montaigne; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Jospeh Conrad; Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Robert Lowell; Edmund Wilson; Elizabeth Bishop; Ambrose Bierce; and Philip Larkin.

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, Epstein considers the lives and works...