Leslie Epstein is a contemporary American novelist, critic, and educator. The fact that he is a comic writer who addresses serious subjects has proven controversial in the critical assessment of his w...
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Critical Essay by Anne Marie Stamford
If you can imagine a Woody Allen movie with the screenplay by Kurt Vonnegut, you'll have a good idea of what [P. D. Kimerakov] is like. Unfortunately for ...
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Critical Essay by George Stade
We know from Leslie Epstein's previous fiction—two novels and a collection of stories—that he has both a social conscience and masterly skills. We ...
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Critical Essay by Susan Lydon
Despite the countless thousands of words expended on the soul of the middle-aged Jewish male (now plumbed nearly to exhaustion), his generational counterpart, the middle...
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Critical Essay by David Bromwich
[In "P. D. Kimerakov"], a Russian scientist—like Nabokov's Pnin but even more muddled and less adept at concealing the muddle—finds...
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Critical Essay by Katha Pollitt
If writers got gold stars for the risks they took, Leslie Epstein would get a handful for the title story of this collection of short fiction. "The Steinway Qui...
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Critical Essay by Ruth R. Wisse
Leslie Epstein's novel, King of the Jews, is loosely based on events in the ghetto of Lodz under the German occupation of World War II. (p. 76)
Although its ...
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Critical Essay by Jane Larkin Crain
Fictionalizing the experiences of those 160,000 Polish Jews who were first herded into the ghetto of Lodz and later deported to the Nazi death camps, this novel re...
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Critical Essay by Neal Ascherson
The plunge attempted by Leslie Epstein in King of the Jews required not merely courage but a degree of self-confidence approaching the suicidal. Epstein has written a...
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Critical Essay by Robert Alter
Making novels out of the holocaust has proved to be a hopelessly self-contradictory enterprise for most writers. The conventional novel, with its formal coherence of be...
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Critical Essay by Edith Milton
[King of the Jews] is elegantly written, paced like a Burger-King commercial, and arranged with a very cunning eye for irony; its cumulative effect is that of an intric...
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Critical Essay by Kirkus Reviews
As critics have often noted, Epstein's fiction—especially P. D. Kimerakov … bears a large resemblance to Saul Bellow's. And this disappoin...
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Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read t...
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