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! I’m 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 Valéry 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 America’s best essayists is a book to be savored.