In a Cardboard Belt!（ISBN=9780547085746）

　　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 Valery 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.

　　Joseph Epstein was born and educated in Chicago, where he was for thirty years a lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University. From 1975 to 1997 he was the editor of The American Scholar. He is the author of the best-selling "Snobbery: The American Version", among other books. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.