Joseph Epstein is, in my opinion, one of the foremost essayists honing the craft today. I just bought his most recent collection, Wind Sprints, and am both exhilarated and encouraged from reading it.
The title itself is an example of Epstein’s thought processes. He takes ideas from one place and plops them down in another that seems out of sync. But then he pulls everything together, rather like an Agatha Christie at the end.
Epstein explains that every essay in it is short and compares them against his other writings by using terms from track and field. For the runner, a wind sprint is the equivalent of 400 meters: quick, intense, powerful. In Wind Sprints, no essay is longer than two-and-a-half pages, and the same adjectives apply.
Epstein takes the metaphor further. He likens literary criticism to the runner’s 440, longer personal essays to the mile, book-length work to the marathon, and short stories to the pole vault. He ends his Introduction with referring to “the great decathlon that is literature.”
I have only read a quarter of the essays that were culled from a nineteen-year section of Epstein’s work. It made me realize I’ve blogged for twelve years already. And since blogs are supposed to be short, I’m dubbing my genre the hundred-meter dash. Maybe someday they’ll show up in a book too.
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