Joseph Epstein is an essayist, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University. His newest book, Snobbery: The American Version (Houghton Mifflin, $25), will be available in July.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Modern Library, $10). The world’s greatest novel, far and away, tout court. It is the novel the author of Madame Bovary might have written if he had had a more generous heart.
And Even Now by Max Beerbohm (Indypublish.com, $24). A slender book of essays that, in its charm and wit, elegance and memorability, is unsurpassed. But then, everything Max Beerbohm wrote bears reading—and rereading.
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Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Volume I (Modern Library, $22). The world’s first, and still best, major biographer—for the excellent reason that, in the figures of the ancient world, he had the richest of all possible subjects. Plutarch’s are studies filled with atrocious behavior, astonishing courage, and much useful moralizing on both by the author.
The Princess Casimassima by Henry James (Viking Penguin, $14). The James novel that shows how wide was his range, and range of sympathies. It is also the book that refutes any claims that this great writer was a snob.
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $18). Singer is a writer of great personal significance for me. More than any other, his splendid stories and novels have put me in touch with my otherwise obscured—by history, by Hitler—Eastern European Jewish origins.
Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals by Edward Shils (University of Chicago Press, $58). A beautiful and rich memoir collection of some of the past century’s most impressive figures from European intellectual life—by a man who, to my great good fortune, also happened to have been my dearest friend.
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