The Meals of His Life
da: The New York Times
Jason Epstein, now in his 80s, has had one of the blazing careers of 20th-century American publishing. As a young editor in the 1950s, he created Anchor Books and helped to start the paperback revolution. He was a founder of both The New York Review of Books and the Library of America. He was the editorial director of Random House for decades and has edited Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. Along the way Mr. Epstein has picked up a reputation as a handy cook and a big eater, skills worth having in publishing, where the real work gets done over lunches, cocktails, dinners and, on good days, flutes of Champagne.
Given Mr. Epstein’s lofty perches over the last 50 years, one enviously suspects he has been present for (or hosted) some of the greatest, most unhinged literary dinner parties of our time. But he’s not sharing news of them in “Eating,” his slim new volume of low-cal memoir and…
