new york times book review mark epstein

The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life

Mark epstein.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2022

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Advice Not Given

A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

By Mark Epstein, M.D.

Jan 15, 2019 | ISBN 9780399564345 | 5-5/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780399564345 --> Buy

Jan 16, 2018 | ISBN 9780399564338 | ISBN 9780399564338 --> Buy

Jan 16, 2018 | 372 Minutes | ISBN 9780525528692 --> Buy

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Jan 15, 2019 | ISBN 9780399564345

Jan 16, 2018 | ISBN 9780399564338

Jan 16, 2018 | ISBN 9780525528692

372 Minutes

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About Advice Not Given

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Also by mark epstein, m.d..

About Mark Epstein, M.D.

Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Advice Not Given, The Trauma of Everyday Life, Thoughts without a… More about Mark Epstein, M.D.

Product Details

The Trauma of Everyday Life

Be a Triangle

Aging as a Spiritual Practice

The Happiness Advantage

The Wise Heart

Widen the Window

In Love with the World

“Most people will never find a great psychiatrist or a great Buddhist teacher, but Mark Epstein is both, and the wisdom he imparts in Advice Not Given is an act of generosity and compassion. The book is a tonic for the ailments of our time.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth “Mark Epstein’s Advice Not Given continues his important, fascinating work in exceptionally lucid language. It also offers its readers a collection of fables, vignettes, and personal revelations with the true capacity to rearrange one’s perspective, even change one’s life. I suspect many of these offerings will stay with me for the long haul, for which I’m very grateful.”— Maggie Nelson, New York Times bestselling author of The Argonauts “Epstein’s book of practical suggestions will leave readers educated, inspired, and equipped with new tools for psychological health.” – Publisher’s Weekly, starred review “Epstein writes with lightness and reverence. There’s a sense of equanimity and deep trust in the experience of life that’s palpable. If you’ve always wanted to develop a relationship with a kind and reassuring psychiatrist, one who knows your every thought and still accepts you, Advice Not Given will give you a taste of that sort of relationship. You’ll feel a sense of ease and an acceptance of yourself, and for what did and didn’t happen—and for what was and wasn’t said.” – PsychologyToday.com, “The Clarity” “In Advice Not Given Mark Epstein shares his remarkably practical wisdom, borne of a brilliant interchange between the fundamentals of Buddhism and the insights of psychotherapy. We all can benefit from this advice, given here freely.” —Daniel Goleman, New York Times bestselling author of Altered Traits and Emotional Intelligence “There are psychologists influenced by Buddhism and Buddhists influenced by psychology, and then there is Mark Epstein, whose deep and humane reflections on healing and self-understanding weave these two great disciplines into a lovely and nuanced whole. As in his other books, only this time more personally and more passionately, Epstein in Advice Not Given offers the reader a rare intelligence and honesty. A pleasure to read and contemplate!” —Norman Fischer, poet, Zen priest, author of What is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind “An integrative pioneer who has done more than anyone to bridge Buddhism with Western psychotherapy, Mark Epstein has now given us a fine distillation of his work, exemplified by revealing insights from his life and practice. Written in spare and elegant prose, Advice Not Given urges us toward the discoveries and unexpected sources of consolation that each tradition offers. A memorable experience.” —George Makari, author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind “ Advice Not Given is a beautiful reminder of what matters; intimate, moving, insightful, tender and tough. It invites me to a wiser mind and an open heart.” —Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart “In times of strife, with a nation divided, and the dire consequences of a warming world sweeping over our lives, Mark Epstein is always there to provide us with a roadmap for a journey of transformation, a pilgrim’s path where the goal is not a place but a state of mind, not a destination but an all embracing state of peace, salvation and liberation. He is America’s physician of the psyche, healer of the mind, avatar of the heart.” —Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow “Mark Epstein’s Advice Not Given is a truly wonderful book—it held me in its intelligent, kind, and lucid grip all the way through, and gave me back to the world at the end a refreshing bit more over myself. I can see Buddha and Freud smiling to each other, pleased about what a gracious insight their partnership in mentoring Dr. Mark had enabled him to bring about and offer to us all in such a work. I cannot recommend this work highly enough to anyone who wants to take better notice of what makes human life so exquisitely worthwhile. A true treasure of a guide to being real.” —Robert A. F. Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhism at Columbia University, and author of Man of Peace: The Illustrated Life Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet “Extraordinary. Mark Epstein does a remarkable job in bringing together the traditions of Buddhism and psychotherapy into an immensely useful book for our time.” —Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot of Upaya Zen Center, and author of Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death “Mark Epstein interweaves psychotherapy and Buddhism in ways that help readers further their own personal growth and practice. At once down to earth, caring, suggestive, a sharing of years of work in the front lines of his own person and helping others.” —Michael Eigen, author of Feeling Matters , Faith, and The Psychoanalytic Mystic “For those looking to explore the idea of a Buddhist psychology in greater depth, Epstein has been writing on the topic since his first book was published in 1995. Advice Not Given is one of his best to date and a perfect place to start.” — Psychologytoday.com

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Meditation Magazine | Feature

The Zen of Therapy

A conversation with the Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein

Mark Epstein, MD, has been exploring the territory where Buddhism and psychotherapy meet for several decades. His many books on the convergence have helped define what amounts to a subgenre in both fields. Epstein’s investigation of Buddhism predates his work in psychotherapy, so the dharma has always influenced how he views his interactions with his patients. It was reassuring to him, he says, that he could bring the Buddhist way of listening—simply being with his patients, what he calls simple kindness —into the psychotherapeutic way of listening, and start to use them interchangeably. This interplay is a major theme of his new book The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life (Penguin Press, 2022), in which he reflects on a year’s worth of therapy sessions. In this conversation with Tricycle ’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, Epstein discusses the role of no-self in therapy and the polarity between doing and being, a concept that he attributes to both Donald Winnicott, a major influence on his work, and Buddhist thought.

Your latest book, The Zen of Therapy , is a departure from your other writings about Buddhism and psychotherapy. This time, you talk about your own process. The question that people are always asking me—and that I’m always trying to avoid—is “How do you bring your Buddhist experience into psychotherapy? Do you teach your patients to meditate? Are you asking them to be mindful? Do you sit quietly with them?” And I always answer, “No, I’m just being a therapist.” But I’m trying to be myself. So somehow, if Buddhism has influenced me, it should be coming through.

I’ve written a lot about translating Buddhist thought into the psychological language of the West, but this time I decided to pay attention to the details of the individual psychotherapy sessions and try to write down, as literally as possible, what happened in sessions where my Buddhist inclinations contributed to the therapy, even in a small way.

Over the course of a year, I accumulated notes from around 50 of these sessions with different patients. It was kind of a mosaic picture of a year of therapy, which happened to end just before the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t read over any of the cases until the year was up, and then I showed it to my editor. I really trust her. She said the through line was really me, not the random selection of patients. She told me to go through each one and write a reflection so that readers could see what was going on in my head while I was being the therapist. I liked that, so that’s what I set out to do.

You write about how the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had to stop interpreting for his patients because he was interfering with the patients’ own process. Can you say how to be with a patient without interpreting everything they say or do? Winnicott says something like, “I realized that I was interpreting mostly to impress myself, but the patient could experience that interpretation as a kind of intrusion.” Things finally started to open up for me as a therapist when I stopped interpreting so much and just let myself be there. That seemed very Buddhist to me. The concept in psychoanalysis about how and when to interpret centers around tact, which is another version of the Buddhist notion of right speech . We all can see what’s wrong with the people we’re close to, but how often is it helpful to tell them what’s wrong with them? Tact is very important in our relationships, including the psychotherapeutic one.

I set up this polarity in the book between doing and being, an idea that comes from Winnicott but is also a Buddhist idea. This is not to devalue doing but to say that doing isn’t everything. There’s this other quality to life that has to do with being that’s also an interpersonal experience. When I’m able to simply be myself with my patients, that quality of attention or awareness or empathy—in the book, I call it simple kindness—is transmissible. Sometimes it can be absorbed by the patient, who might need that quality in their experience.

You quote Gary Snyder, who years ago wrote in Tricycle that “within a traditional Buddhist framework of ethical values and psychological insight, the mind essentially reveals itself.” What is happening when the quality of being allows the patient that space for the mind to reveal itself? I love that about the mind revealing itself. While I was deeply inspired by my Buddhist explorations, which did happen way before I even began my training to become a psychiatrist, that way of working is part of the psychoanalytic tradition, even going back to Freud. In psychoanalysis, the patient is lying on the couch without looking at the therapist, so that the analyst is simply listening and the patient is listening to themself, to their own mind (or unconscious, as Freud talked about it). That was one of the parallels that I saw originally when I started my training. The analytic attitude and the method of free association or evenly suspended, free-floating attention was remarkably similar to the mindful attention we learn about in Buddhism. It was very reassuring to me that I could bring the Buddhist way of listening into the psychotherapeutic way of listening and start to use them interchangeably.

“Things finally started to open up for me as a therapist when I stopped interpreting so much and just let myself be there. That seemed very Buddhist to me.”

You explore the Buddhist teaching on no-self in relationship to psychoanalytic theories of self. In particular, you ask, “if inklings of no-self are not necessarily signs and symptoms of developmental deficits but also windows into underlying truth, how are we to proceed?” When I was growing up, I was always worried that my self wasn’t “self” enough. Where was I? I was preoccupied with that question. I couldn’t help comparing myself with the people around me, who look like they have bigger, better, and more real selves than I do. You could call it anxiety or insecurity. But this self that we’re brought up in the Western world to think should exist, it doesn’t really exist in the way we imagined it, which is what the Dalai Lama always says: It’s not that there’s no self, because that’s ridiculous. You’re you, and I’m me. But the self doesn’t exist in the way we imagined it does. Winnicott always said that most people can’t really get out of their childhoods without creating a “false self” or “caretaker self” that tries to take care of either the intrusive or the abandoning environment of family life.

All of those ideas were swirling around when I was writing this book: What if the self doesn’t have to be what we think it should be? What if we were correct in wondering about it even from a very young age but had to push all that away in order to function? And then Buddhism or therapy comes along and says, relax about all that and just see what’s there. Try to find it as it really exists, not as you think it should.

You quote your friend and former therapist Michael Vincent Miller as saying that Buddhism and psychotherapy “both aim for the restoration of innocence after experience.” Can you say something about what that means? When he said that to me, I didn’t even know what it meant, but I knew it felt profound. Especially in the psychotherapy world, we’re led to believe that experience is everything—that we’re supposed to learn from experience, and that’s what life is about. But then I think of the koan: what was your face before you were born?

When Ram Dass first found out that I had become a psychiatrist, he said, teasing me a little bit, “Mark, are you a Buddhist psychiatrist now?” I said, “I guess so.” And he said, “Do you see the patients as already free?” I think I do see them as already free. It’s the idea that there’s a hidden kindness in life or that buddhanature is inherent to who we are.

Experience layers us, and we do learn from it, but we also have to defend ourselves against experience and the ways we start to develop ideas about identity and who we are, who the other person is, and so on. Our original innocence gets covered up and lost. When we talk about the feeling in meditation of coming home or being at peace about ourselves, there’s some reconnection with that innocence. I think that’s what Michael was getting at.

I’ve often had difficulty reconciling a psychological orientation and Buddhist practice, but you seem to hold both in balance. For instance, you talk about the oceanic feeling and Freud’s take on that, which you don’t dismiss, while understanding its value from a Buddhist perspective. I don’t know how much your readers know about what Freud meant by the oceanic feeling. He had a long correspondence with a French poet named Romain Rolland, who was a student of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and told Freud a lot about what happened to him in meditation. Freud wrote that Rolland’s meditation experiences reminded him of a young child at the breast and that they were seeking a restoration of the limitless narcissism of the infant. I think that that’s partially true.

On meditation retreats, if we’re lucky enough, we have these blissful experiences. That’s one of the things that we keep coming back for. If you really look at what they are, how addictive they can be, and how people get trapped in seeking them, those retreat experiences do have a lot of that blissful feeling of the infant at the breast, the restoration of limitless narcissism. That’s part of their power. I always see that as part of the concentration practices, the samadhi practices. They give you that holding environment for the mind that has an infinite quality. But it’s not solely the experience of the infant at the breast; it’s also the experience of the mother holding the infant. Once we start to use the accumulated samadhi to investigate the nature of mind, we become much more like John Cage, who’s hearing everything and allowing everything in the way a mother hears and holds a baby. It’s the maternal quality or the parental quality that is also oceanic. Trying to figure out how to talk about that was interesting and fun for me.

You just mentioned John Cage, whose ideas appear throughout your book. You’re working with the art of therapy, and in a certain way you’re performing an art that is similar to Cage’s; it’s a spontaneous, unblocked opening. That’s the improvisational nature of therapy. That’s one of the things that the process requires. That might just be the way that I work, but I think it’s proven to be an important capacity to bring to the encounter. It takes a kind of trust, too—to trust my own mind without trying too hard to find the right interpretation but rather to use what comes up in a judicious way to engage, provoke, and support a patient.

I imagine early in your career as a Harvard Medical School–trained psychiatrist you thought you needed to know answers and to give your patients answers. In any event, you seem to have come to this place where it’s ok if you don’t know. The thing about becoming a psychiatrist via the medical route is that they don’t really teach you anything about being a therapist. They teach you about diseases, and then one day, you’re the psychiatrist. It’s not like with a surgeon where you can assist and watch how to do it. You have to go with the patient into the room and be the therapist with hardly any education on how to do it.

For me, that was good because I had to figure it out for myself. I already had the Buddhist training, so the best I could do was to try to deploy for the patient what I had learned for my own mind. That set me on this path that we’re talking about now. I’ve had good therapy teachers since, but they were all supportive of not-knowing as the foundation of the relationship.

That really comes through in the book. It really comes through how much I don’t know. [ Laughs. ]

No, no. [ Laughs .] That you’re comfortable when you don’t know, and you can relax into that. It’s exciting to me. It’s a mutual discovery. That’s what therapy is all about.

Adapted from an interview with Mark Epstein by Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, for the Tricycle Talks podcast.

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Publishing innovator Jason Epstein has died at 93

The Associated Press

Jason Epstein, seen in 2001, co-founder of The New York Review of Books, has died at age 93. Jim Cooper/AP hide caption

Jason Epstein, seen in 2001, co-founder of The New York Review of Books, has died at age 93.

NEW YORK — Jason Epstein, a publishing innovator and bon vivant who helped put the classics in paperback, co-founded The New York Review of Books and worked with such novelists as E.L. Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, has died at age 93. Epstein died Friday "surrounded by his books" at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., said his wife, the author and former New York Times journalist Judith Miller. The cause was congestive heart failure, she said. The book world has its share of accidental lifers and Epstein was one. Once a young bohemian who desired only enough money to have time for reading, he took a job at Doubleday in the early 1950s, joined Random House in 1958 and remained for decades as editorial director. He became one of the industry's most honored executives, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the National Book Foundation, presenters, of the National Book Award, in 1988; and from the National Book Critics Circle in 2002. Epstein was not just a man of letters, but of food and drink, whose own books included the memoir Eating and whose dining companions ranged from Buster Keaton to Jacqueline Kennedy to the notorious attorney-political operative Roy Cohn. In Making It , a 1967 best-seller about the literary world, Norman Podhoretz wrote affectionately of Epstein's tastes for imported shoes, first-class travel and "appallingly expensive" restaurants. "He was beautiful to watch," Podhoretz observed. He was as well-read and as opinionated as the authors he worked with, "so damned intelligent," Mailer would joke, once telling The Associated Press that he had to adjust to an editor "who might be a lot brighter" then he was. Epstein published an early excerpt of Nabokov's Lolita and fought unsuccessfully to convince Doubleday to publish the scandalous novel about a professor's obsession with a 12-year old girl. Epstein also feuded bitterly with Gore Vidal and became a critic of the Library of America, believing that the imprint he helped establish had grown bloated. Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf would call him the "cross I bear," while Epstein labeled Cerf "the bear I cross." Among the many books edited by Epstein: Doctorow's Depression-era novel Billy Bathgate , Jane Jacobs' classic of urban studies The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Mailer's CIA epic Harlot's Ghost . Epstein admittedly passed over the occasional best-seller, although he was proud of rejecting Shirley MacLaine's New Age favorite Out on a Limb . "We were friends and she actually wrote much of that book at my house in Sag Harbor (on New York's Long Island). But she never told me what it was about," Epstein told the AP in 2000. "I read this and I said, 'Come on, Shirley, you're nuts.'" The son of a successful textile salesman, Epstein grew up in Maine and Massachusetts, where he acquired his longtime passion for fine cuisine and spent so much time at the library that one librarian saved his card while he and his family spent a year in New York City. In the late 1940s, he entered Columbia University, when the school's president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Epstein met the future U.S. president once, and, by accident, made a fine impression. "I had spent the night downtown with a girl," Epstein told the AP. "I could hardly stand up. I had been up all night and he thought I was a bright young fellow, up bright and early. He was beaming, and he shook my hand." In his early 20s, his quest for affordable classics inspired him to start one of publishing's first literary paperback imprints, Anchor Books, now part of Penguin Random House. He also helped launch two other major and lasting projects. One came in the early 1960s when a newspaper strike and the general tedium of literacy criticism led Epstein and his then-wife, Barbara, to help found The New York Review of Books , along with critic Elizabeth Hardwick and editor Robert Silvers among others. In the late 1970s, he was among the creators of the Library of America, which offers hardcover editions of the country's most influential writers. He had two children with Barbara Epstein: daughter Helen Epstein, a contributor to The New York Review of Books ; and son Jacob Epstein, a television writer whose time in the book world was brief and unfortunate. His novel The Wild Oats was published in 1979 and was soon found to contain numerous similarities to Martin Amis' The Rachel Papers . "Epstein wasn't influenced by 'The Rachel Papers,'" Amis wrote at the time, "he had it flattened out beside his typewriter." Jason Epstein was the rare publishing veteran to show early and unforced enthusiasm for technology. He looked for ways to sell books online before the rise of e-books and Amazon.com and was a strong advocate for in-store machines that could print and bind works on demand. Epstein essentially advocated a system that enabled authors to bypass the industry that employed him, looking back to the days when Parson Weems could sell books about George Washington by simply sitting under a tree and hitting on a drum. "Soon writers and readers will be able to meet again on a worldwide green where writers may once more beat their drums or hire a Weems to drum up business for them," Epstein wrote in Book Business , a memoir published in 2001. "On the World Wide Web, future storytellers and their readers can mingle at leisure and talk at length."

Yet another critic on the Death of the Novel: What he and everyone else are missing

Joseph Epstein's latest book, "The Novel, Who Needs It" offers a conservative defense of the form.

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The Novel, Who Needs It?

By Joseph Epstein Encounter: 152 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Joseph Epstein ’s “ The Novel, Who Needs It? ” is the latest in a rich tradition of hand-wringing about the state of what has become the preeminent artistic form of the last few centuries. For much of its history, the novel has had its honor defended by a who’s-who of literary stalwarts against cultural forces allegedly arrayed against it. Over the centuries these have ranged from sentimental romance writers (per Samuel Johnson ) to rationalists like Edgar Allan Poe , the masses who consume TV or those who prefer Michael Crichton .

The problem with these polemics, manifestos and personal theses is that as much as their culprits have changed, they all pretty much make the same arguments, cite the same benefits and even use the same language. Epstein, to his credit, acknowledges the persistence of anxiety over the novel’s health. Citing an entry from 1856 in the Goncourt brothers ’ collaborative diary, in which they lamented that the fiction of Poe was “sickly,” “analytic” and “monomaniacal,” Epstein then jump-cuts to a 2014 essay by the novelist Will Self , in which he laments having to watch the art form to which he committed his life die in front of him.

Notes on the (non-)death of the book

I’m tired of reading about the death of the book.

May 5, 2014

“The announcement of the Death of The Novel has over the years become something close to a regular event,” he seems to lament, although a few sentences later he writes, “Yet just now talk about the death of the novel has a credibility it has not quite had before.” This reminded me of Tobias Funke in “Arrested Development” telling his wife, Lindsay, that the open relationships he advises his therapy patients to explore “never” work for them but they still “delude themselves into thinking it might … but it might work for us.” No one in nearly two centuries has been able to save the novel … but it might work for Epstein? (Narrator: It doesn’t.)

"The Novel, Who Needs It?" by Joseph Epstein

Just who are the enemies this time around? Epstein has made a modest name for himself as an amiable conservative curmudgeon, a sort of George Will lite, and his antagonists are many: the internet, political correctness, MFA workshops, commercial pressures, graphic novels, therapeutic culture and the supposed rise of vulgarity. To prove that recent novels are diminished by these forces of decline, he quotes from reviews and not the novels, as he not so subtly implies that reading them is beneath him — a strategy so unbecoming of a critic I’m surprised it passed muster with his editor.

Epstein is one of the most prolific literary critics in America, having published 17 collections of reviews, profiles and essays — a preeminent expert on the novel, in other words. And yet, for all his critical acumen (and Epstein can be an astute critic), he isn’t really treading new ground, and when he does it’s in the wrong direction. Many of his points were made nearly three decades ago by another curmudgeon of American letters, Jonathan Franzen , in an essay that struck such a chord with the literary world it was referred to simply as “ the Harper’s essay .” Franzen complains that the novel is no longer culturally central, that consumerism strangles an “antithetical product” like a novel, that technology has outpaced the speed of fiction, that we solve all our problems with quick fixes and that — on a more personal note — the world wasn’t sufficiently celebrating his writing.

Reading the Harper’s essay now, it’s hard not to side with James Wood when he remarked that the essay is “incoherent,” oscillating among global pessimism, personal turmoil and tangents about things like how his good manners preclude him from telling his brother, “who is a fan of Michael Crichton, that the work I’m doing is simply better than Crichton’s.” What a tough beat.

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Like Epstein, Franzen almost gets the point before turning away from it. “The current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities,” he concedes, “shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel.” Our literature may even be “healthier” because we’ve disabused ourselves of the need for a monoculture, which was, after all, “an instrument for the perpetuation of a white, male, heterosexual elite.” Maybe life is too multitudinous for any one novel to capture its spirit, he muses, and “perhaps ten novels from ten different cultural perspectives are required now.”

But just as soon as Franzen arrives at this moment of clarity, he also argues that young writers feel “imprisoned by their ethnic and gender identities” and are “discouraged from speaking across boundaries.” He wants his fiction big and diverse and emblematic of an entire culture; none of this “My Interesting Childhood” nonsense that MFAs produce.

An author with gray hair wearing a flowery shirt, gesturing with a microphone while sitting on a couch.

Epstein drags Franzen’s complaint, which is at least sincerely about narrative scope, three decades forward and straight into the culture wars. “A writer is no longer permitted,” Epstein declares, though it happens all the time, “to ‘appropriate’ the material of those to whom presumably by rights it belongs.” He goes on to defend the writer Lionel Shriver , who “caused a stir when she rightly complained that the ideologies behind ‘appropriation’ would put an end to all fiction.” Epstein neglects to mention that Shriver made these complaints while donning a sombrero , nor that Shriver spends a good chunk of that speech settling scores with critics who called her novel “The Mandibles” racist because, according to her, “it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line.”

What Epstein, Shriver and Franzen miss is that — setting aside a few high-profile Goodreads pile-ons — hundreds of novels arrive every year filled with characters whose race, gender, sexuality or nationality differ from their authors and no one bats an eye. The problems occur when writers don’t take their responsibility seriously. How can you simultaneously argue that the novel’s power is unsurpassed and then treat the consequences of that power as meaningless?

Author Salman Rushdie holds up a copy of his controversial book, "The Satanic Verses" during a 1992 news conference in Arlington, Va. Iran's foreign minister said Thursday SEPT. 24, 1998 that his government would distance itself from a $2.5 million reward for killing British novelist Salman Rushdie, and was ready to exchange ambassadors with Britain. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Salman Rushdie and the long shadow of ‘The Satanic Verses’

Salman Rushdie was marked for death and celebrated as an icon after writing “The Satanic Verses.” Last week’s near-fatal attack reminds us of the stakes

Aug. 17, 2022

Whereas for Epstein the stakes of the novel’s livelihood are primarily abstract, for those “cultural minorities” he mentions, the turmoil takes an altogether more menacing shape. The theorist bell hooks notes in an essay on Toni Morrison that few Black women writers are considered “serious.” The pioneering gay novelist Gore Vidal recalls how the publication of his novel “The City and the Pillar” in 1948 was met with “shock and disbelief.” Salman Rushdie very nearly died because his novel “The Satanic Verses” was deemed heretical. These concerns are deeper and more vital to confront than any of the issues raised by Franzen or Epstein, because they have actual stakes. Rushdie, hooks, et al., worked to improve the novel; Epstein and his confreres want the world to change around it.

Maybe the biggest reason of all that Epstein and Franzen — and the Goncourts and Samuel Johnson before them — have been so ineffective at defending the novel is that they’ve been ineffective at defining it. And not for lack of trying: To Epstein it’s a standard-bearer of the right and proper, to Franzen a kaleidoscopic rebuke of pop simplification, to the Goncourts some rearguard defense against the technical age, to Johnson a rejection of sentimentality.

For Epstein, if we lose the novel “we are forced to fall back on the rather sterile concepts and ideas that current-day philosophy and social sciences ... provide.” But what deeper truths does the novel offer to transcend false notions? A great novelist methodically dismantles them, as Epstein points out, but that means the responsibility for the novel’s vitality lies not in readers, nor in critics — especially those who don’t read the books — but in writers. They must work vigilantly to maintain the novel’s health, in part by accurately reflecting life as it is, not as they wish it to be.

In 1884, Henry James wrote that the “only condition” he could think of for the writing of a novel is “that it be sincere.” The novel offers its creator a freedom that “is a splendid privilege,” James continues, “and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it.”

Clark is the author of “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom” and the forthcoming “Skateboard.”

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The New York Times is facing fresh controversy over its influential bestseller book list after Elon Musk posted on X about a years-old lawsuit that accused the paper of tweaking its rankings according to subjective criteria.

“The New York Times is pure propaganda,” Musk, the CEO of X, wrote on Sunday in response to a post that said the list is “editorial content,” not based on sales figures.

“Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake,” wrote Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase and former general partner of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.

Srinivasan, who is also the author of “The Network State,” continued: “They were forced to admit in court that it is not a ranked list. It’s actually ‘editorial content’ and they can exclude books they don’t like.”

In his post, Srinivasan provided a link to a “Kill Zone,” a blog devoted to top thriller and mystery writers, which recounted the story of William Peter Blatty, who wrote “The Exorcist” and its sequel, “Legion.”

In 1983, Blatty sued The Times for $6 million in Los Angles Superior Court, claiming the Grey Lady “ignored actual sales figures” from his publisher for “Legion,” alleging that it was kept off the list because of “either negligence or intentional falsehood.”

The blog said that The Times, which claimed the list was derived from sales, countered in court that its list “was not mathematically objective but was editorial content and thus protected under the Constitution as free speech.”

A rep for The Times declined to comment on Tuesday but shared the same link it shared with Esquire to its methodology, which says the weekly lists are “determined by sales numbers” from a variety of sellers across the country. It does not specify how The Times uses that information to determine where a book lands on the list.

The California court dismissed Blatty’s case but it was reinstated by the Court of Appeal in LA, saying the author was entitled to go to trial to try to prove the paper falsely represented the list as accurate and unbiased.

The Times brought the case to the state Supreme Court, saying the appellate ruling could open a Pandora’s Box to widespread legal claims by other authors that being off the list had cost them some kind of “prospective advantage.”

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving the lower court’s ruling that The Times bestseller list was “editorial content, not objective factual content,” which gave the paper license to exclude whatever book they deemed fit.

The ruling still surprises critics who assumed the list was a direct reflection of books with the highest sales.

Content strategist Jason Levin, who wrote “Memes Make Millions,” replied to Musk’s post: “NYT Bestseller list = Our favorites because we have better taste than the average American because we’re smarter Forbes 30 Under 30 = Forbes 30 Dumbasses We Tricked into Paying Us TIME Person of the Year = hahah remember when Hitler was person of the year yeah me too.”

Free Press founder and editor Bari Weiss added : “‘BAD THERAPY’ by @AbigailShrier is the #1 book on all of Amazon. But didn’t make the @nytimes bestseller list.”

While the bestseller list debuted in October 1931, the confusion about its methodology endures today.

The opaque path to making The Times’ bestseller list has been widely written about over the years, and includes several lists covering paperbacks, audiobooks, e-books, children’s books and business titles among others, as well as serious marketing and PR campaigns from book publishers.

In Equire’s 2022 piece “The Murky Path to Becoming a New York Times Best Seller, ” scribe Sophie Vershbow, chronicled the confusing methodology.

“No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated—and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers,” Vershbow wrote.

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THE AMERICAN VERSION

by Joseph Epstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2002

By a snob, of snobs, and for snobs: a nice example of the art of the essay.

Clever, prolific Epstein ( Narcissus Leaves the Pool , 1999, etc.) turns his wit to the pernicious, universal failing previously addressed by such worthies as Edith Wharton, Tom Wolfe, Russell Lynes, and even Father Mencken, among countless others.

Dissecting snobbery in all its current manifestations, Epstein (English/Northwestern) examines the ways in which people who pursue lives of invidious comparison may judge you (and surely find you wanting) in matters of employment, education, income, affiliations, intellectual interests, spouse(s), ethnicity, favored comestibles, politics, celebrity, dogs, and, not least, progeny. Of course, a snob is Janus-faced. Note the contortions necessary to look up to paragons who are above contempt while simultaneously looking down on the dopes beneath consideration. A pretty slick slope, indeed. The classification of snobs as slobs or nobs is undertaken with fine spirit by our snobographer. Undeniably, perhaps unavoidably, it’s all a bit self-referential, with personal dislikes and dropped names. There’s wonderful dissing of the likes of Susan Sontag, Joe Alsop, Tina Brown, and the ineffable Mr. Vidal. The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker figure prominently. The author takes the role, not of Eustace Tilley, but of a Jewish innocent in Snobland, while he confesses to a smidgen of Anglophilia. Mark the passing use of such Briticisms as “navvies,” “bloody,” or “a mug’s game.” On the other hand, Yiddishisms bloom too, as in “ kvell ,” “ allrightnik ,” and—happy conflation—“ Vive le schmuck !” Epstein presents beautifully opinionated epigrams and judgments, sometimes off-base (is The Donald truly uninterested in joining Society?), mostly spot-on and consistently thoughtful and entertaining. There’s no cure for snobbery, but please dispense with the ostentatious Rolex, Mont Blanc, or duds by Prada and enjoy the polemics.

Pub Date: July 9, 2002

ISBN: 0-395-94417-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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Brendan Fraser Joins Cast of ‘Flower Moon’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers ask judges to overturn her conviction, arguing Jeffrey Epstein's plea deal shields her

Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers are arguing for her release in a federal appeals court.
The appeal focuses on a nonprosecution agreement between Jeffrey Epstein and federal prosecutors.
If the appeal is successful, Maxwell could be freed and face another trial.

Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell — the former Jeffrey Epstein associate convicted of trafficking girls to him for sex — asked a federal appeals court Tuesday afternoon to overturn her conviction and set her free from prison, arguing that a deal Justice Department officials struck with Jeffrey Epstein should have shielded her from being prosecuted in the first place.

The arguments, held in an ornate Manhattan courtroom before a panel of three judges, hinged on a controversial 2007 non-prosecution agreement between Epstein and Alexander Acosta, who then served as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Through the agreement, Epstein was permitted to serve a light sentence after pleading guilty to soliciting sex from an underage girl — even though law enforcement officials had concluded that he sexually abused dozens of girls.

Maxwell's lawyers argue that the contract's blanket over "potential co-conspirators" extends to her, and restricts federal prosecutors across the entire United States — not just southern Florida — from bringing a criminal case related to Epstein's sexual abuse.

Ripping up such an agreement would embed "a dagger in the hearts of the trust between the government and its citizens regarding such plea agreements," Diana Fabi Samson, a lawyer for Maxwell, told the judges, of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.

A jury in Manhattan federal court found Maxwell guilty of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021, four days after her 60th birthday that Christmas. The jurors agreed with the prosecutors' allegations that she groomed four girls for Epstein to rape and, in some cases, sexually abused them herself.

Alison Nathan, the judge who oversaw Maxwell's trial, sentenced her to 20 years in prison and issued a $750,000 fine. In her sentencing remarks, Nathan said Maxwell weaponized her status as a sophisticated adult woman to deceive the girls into trusting her.

"She befriended and developed relationships of trust," Nathan said at the hearing. "She then manipulated the victims and normalized sexual abuse through her involvement, encouragement, and instruction."

Maxwell is serving her sentence in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, and did not appear at the hearing herself. She listened into the hearing remotely, Arthur Aidala, another of Maxwell's attorneys, told journalists after the hearing.

If the judges agree with her lawyers' arguments, Maxwell could be set free and — depending on the ruling — face another trial.

It could force the women who already testified about Epstein's sexual abuse to face testifying again, repeating their experiences to a jury they would hope believed them.

Aidala said the plain language of the contract — binding "the United States" — worked in Maxwell's favor.

He said he believed several Supreme Court Justices — including Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch — would agree with that reading. Different circuit courts understood the relevant precedents in different ways, making the case ripe for the high court to review the case, he said.

"Quite frankly, I hope they aren't scared away by the name of the defendant," Aidala said.

Epstein's nonprosecution agreement and a juror issue complicate the case

The appeal has moved slowly to a hearing. Maxwell retained the firm Aidala Bertuna & Kamins, well known in New York's legal scene for taking on challenging cases, including the appeal for the former film producer Harvey Weinstein's criminal conviction in Manhattan and the defense of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York from disbarment.

Her 113-page appeal brief was authored partly by John M. Leventhal, a former New York state appeals court judge.

Tuesday's hearings exclusively focused on the nonprosecution agreement between Epstein and the Justice Department.

Fabi Samson said Epstein had abided by its terms, but that federal prosecutors in Manhattan violated it by opening an investigation into Epstein in 2018, following a series of Miami Herald articles about the deal. The Herald's reporting led to the resignation of Alexander Acosta from then-President Donald Trump's cabinet, where he was serving as Labor Secretary at the time.

One of the judges, Raymond Lohier, appeared skeptical that Maxwell was covered by the agreement, much less federal prosecutors outside of the Southern District of Florida. But Fabi Samson argued that the Justice Department's own investigation into the Epstein deal, and its manual for plea agreements, suggested Acosta had "plenary authority."

Watch: How did Jeffrey Epstein's address book end up in the hands of a communist farmer in Vermont?

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Book excerpt: Theo Epstein used bold moves, new metrics to construct 2004 team | McAdam

EDITOR’S NOTE : This excerpt from “The Franchise: Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Sox” is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon , Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or TriumphBooks.com/FranchiseRedSox.

The Red Sox have a long tradition of employing general managers who were New England natives.

Dick O’Connell, Lou Gorman, Dan Duquette, Ben Cherington, Mike Hazen, and Brian O’Halloran all grew up in New England, every one of them Red Sox fans.

But no one grew up closer to Fenway than Theo Epstein, who, though born in New York, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, just several miles from the ballpark.

Epstein came to the job almost accidentally. When the John Henry–Tom Werner–Larry Lucchino ownership group was approved in 2002, spring training was already underway, and time was tight for making hirings.

Still, the new owners wanted a clean sweep from the past and dismissed both manager Joe Kerrigan and GM Dan Duquette. In Duquette’s place, the team installed Mike Port as the interim GM for the year with a goal of undertaking a more thorough search of applicants after the 2002 season.

For a time—indeed, officially for a few fleeting hours—Billy Beane had an agreement with the Red Sox to leave the Oakland A’s and become the Red Sox’s president of baseball operations. At the time, Beane was seen as the leader of a new generation of executives who combined traditional player evaluation methods (scouting, etc.) with more revolutionary ones involving analytics.

Beane had found early success by searching for market inefficiencies and finding skill sets that had beenunderappreciated by other executives. Such an approach appealed to Henry in particular, who had become wildly successful in the field of hedge funds by employing a similarly advanced analytic approach.

But after weeks of back-and-forth negotiations for the Red Sox—first with Oakland ownership, and then Beane himself— Beane determined that he was unwilling to move from the Bay Area to the East Coast, even after the Sox had agreed to let him spend a significant period based in California to ease concerns about his family.

That prompted the Red Sox to start the search all over again. Before long, Epstein, who had spent the 2002 season as Port’s assistant and was well known to Lucchino from their time together with the San Diego Padres, emerged as a candidate, despite his age (28) and relatively thin résumé.

Epstein’s appointment to GM was greeted with mockery in some circles. A cartoon of Michael Jackson hanging Epstein off a balcony—as he had famously done in London with his own toddler—circulated and jokes were made about Epstein not being able to stay up late on school nights.

Epstein absorbed all the barbs about his youth and inexperience with good nature. But he—and the Red Sox— would have the last laugh.

Soon, it was clear how nontraditional Epstein would be.

In a highly unorthodox move, Epstein claimed journeyman outfielder/first baseman Kevin Millar on waivers, blocking the Florida Marlins from selling Millar to a team in Japan. Such actions were unheard of at the time—teams simply didn’t get in the way of a nearly completed transaction. But Epstein wasn’t one to bow to convention.

In Millar, he saw a useful righty bat who could provide the Sox with an important piece. It didn’t matter to him that the Marlins had other plans. This was hardball, and it was Epstein’s charge to assemble the best roster available—the Old Boy Network be damned.

More moves followed, each designed to make the Red Sox better. How much better was almost incidental. Epstein saw the process of roster building as incremental, part of a puzzle. With each move, the pieces fit together a little better.

Circumstances, however, mandated more dramatic action after the 2003 season. The Red Sox lost Game 7 of the ALCS when Pedro Martinez faltered in the late innings and the Sox lacked a surefire closer option out of the bullpen.

For all the advances being made when it came to player evaluation, when the autopsy was performed on the 2003 Sox, even the most casual fan could see that the team had come up empty because of a lack of pitching. There was no need to run programs through “Carmine,” the Red Sox’s computerized software system that was revealed in a lengthy Sports Illustrated feature; no need to consult with sabermetric godfather Bill James, or for any careful study of analytics. Simply put, the Red Sox, as had seemingly been the case for so many years in franchise history, needed arms.

That much was obvious to even the most casual observer.

The 2003 Red Sox certainly didn’t lack for offense, that’s for sure.

Those Sox had scored 961 runs, the second-most in franchise history, with six hitters contributing 20 or more homers and eight supplying 85 or more RBI.

So Epstein set out to address that obvious deficiency. He along with assistant GM Jed Hoyer, spent Thanksgiving with Curt Schilling and his family in Arizona, attempting to persuade Schilling to waive a no-trade clause in his contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

With Schilling agreeable to a deal—and extended—the trade was made. It turned out to be a master stroke for Epstein, providing the Sox with another top-of-the-rotation starter.

The other was the signing of free agent Keith Foulke. The Red Sox loved that Foulke was durable beyond belief and capable of pitching more than one inning per outing. They would lean on Foulke heavily in the 2004 postseason—the team played 14 games that month and Foulke appeared in 11 of them, allowing a grand total of one earned run in 14 innings.

It was fitting that he was on the mound when the Sox finished off their sweep of the Cardinals for the first title in 86 years; a year earlier, the Red Sox didn’t have a reliever of his dependability to whom they could turn late in postseason games.

But Epstein’s boldest stroke—not only that season, but for his entire tenure in Boston—came at the trade deadline in the middle of the 2004 season.

The Red Sox were plodding along—in contention but underachieving somewhat in the American League playoff race.

Worse, the Sox weren’t sure what they were going to get from shortstop Nomar Garciaparra.

Battling a variety of injuries, Garciaparra was in and out of the lineup in the first half, playing in just 38 of the first 100 games. He also sent a message to management that he was unsure how much he could be counted on in the second half of the season.

All of that proved too much for Epstein, who went into the trade deadline with a thought that would have been unthinkable only months earlier—to trade off Garciaparra.

Garciaparra had been a dynamic player for the Sox in his first seven seasons, winning two batting titles, scoring 100 or more runs on six occasions, and four times driving in 100 or more runs. In the mythical battle for Best Shortstop in the American League—a contest involving Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Miguel Tejada—Garciaparra was the Boston entrant, and a homegrown one at that.

But Garciaparra’s relationship with the team had begun to fray. Ownership had made a contract extension offer in the spring, but while Garciaparra deliberated, the offer was then pulled off the table. That, his uncertain availability, and, by extension, his deteriorating defensive play all conspired to force Epstein’s hand. In a stunning, complicated swap involving three other teams, Epstein dealt off Garciaparra and young outfielder Matt Murton and ended up with shortstop Orlando Cabrera and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz.

It was audacious on Epstein’s part, a point made patently obvious to him when he left Fenway after news of the deal became public and was met with expletive-filled rants from fans as he walked to nearby Kenmore Square.

That night, for the first time in his life, he took an Ambien to help him sleep.The bold stroke proved to be just what the Red Sox needed—on the field and in the clubhouse. Cabrera brought dependability to the shortstop position, even if he wasn’t nearly the offensive performer that his predecessor was. And, at first, the slick-fielding Mientkiewicz proved to be a huge upgrade.

Epstein had fretted that the team’s shaky infield defense would be, in his words, his club’s “fatal flaw,” but that was now rectified.

At the same time, Garciaparra had become increasingly negative, a brooding presence in the clubhouse, warning teammates that management couldn’t be trusted and railing against media coverage of the team. With Garciaparra gone, the mood lightened, and suddenly the atmosphere surrounding the Sox was instantly improved.

The real payoff came in October, when the team that Epstein had constructed rallied from what looked like certain defeat to the Yankees in the ALCS and then steamrolled the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight to capture their first championship in almost 90 years.

In a jubilant Red Sox clubhouse celebration, Epstein, who had a knack for saying the right thing at the right time, toasted the players and organization and proclaimed, “Now, 1918 is just another year in which the Red Sox won the World Series.”

The room erupted in recognition. For years, the players, staff members and others in the organization had heard the cruel chants of “1918! 1918!” especially in New York. But the sweep of the Cardinals had disarmed that taunt and rendered it meaningless.

At the time, the analytics movement was in its infancy, and it was easy—if more than a little lazy—to suggest that Epstein was simply reacting to computer-generated data. But such a stance revealed ignorance.

It was never Epstein’s intent to reinvent how players were evaluated; rather, he was looking to make the process more efficient and accurate. But while utilizing new data, Epstein never ran from the game’s traditions.

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13 Things We’re Still Mad About: Oscars Edition

We asked staffers in Culture and Books about the snubs from years past that still bother them, and they had some things to say.

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Michelle Pfeiffer, dressed as Catwoman, reclines while looking directly at the camera.

By The New York Times

I have never forgiven the Oscars for picking “Birdman” over “Boyhood.” What can I say — “Boyhood” was moving and meaningful, while “Birdman” was pretentious and obtuse, and none of my cinéaste colleagues are going to persuade me otherwise. MICHAEL PAULSON, theater reporter

I am still mad about the academy’s refusal to recognize, even just to nominate, Greta Gerwig for her creative work on one of the best movies of its decade. The film I’m of course referring to is “Frances Ha,” for which Gerwig was the lead actress and co-screenwriter (with Noah Baumbach, who directed) — a brilliant, joy-filled movie about art and youth that borrowed from mumblecore, Rohmer and Woody Allen while arguably surpassing them all, and which was nominated for a grand total of zero Oscars. MARC TRACY, reporter

When I first started to comprehend what Oscars recognize and celebrate, I was a tween who’d recently been enraptured by the greatest onscreen performance I’d ever seen: Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle turned Catwoman in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns,” in which she nails the attitude of a woman who’s been belittled and underestimated one too many times. When I expressed dismay that she’d been snubbed, I was met with condescension from adults who informed me, with a pat on the head, that superhero movies don’t get acting Oscars. Of course today, that couldn’t be more untrue, and every year, when l watch “Batman Returns” (it’s a Christmas movie , don’t forget), I grow more convinced that Pfeiffer’s unhinged yet unflappable performance delivers a rare frisson and deserved a nomination. When she purrs, “Life’s a bitch, now so am I,” I still gasp. MAYA SALAM, editor and reporter

Ava DuVernay should have been recognized for directing both 2014’s “Selma” and last year’s “Origin.” She is one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Her leading stars — David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Isabel Wilkerson in “Origin” — also deserved nominations for their staggering work in both films. BARBARA CHAI, deputy culture editor

“Shakespeare in Love” beating “Saving Private Ryan” for best picture is the snub I can never let go of, partly because it just feels artistically wrong but mostly because it cost me a payday on my office Oscar pool that year. DAVID RENARD, senior editor

Eddie Murphy not winning for “Dreamgirls” in 2007. And I get him walking out, too. Why should he have to put on another performance for the academy that robbed him? (And then he pulled out of hosting the ceremony five years later … nothing against Billy Crystal, of course, but that was a massive disappointment.) ALEXANDRA JACOBS, book critic

It is absurd that Brian De Palma is the only member of the movie-brat generation of directors (Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese) who has never even received an Oscar nomination. His best shot was probably in 1988 when his mainstream hit “The Untouchables” received four, including a win for Sean Connery, but he was beat out, in a cruel twist, by Adrian Lyne, who directed “Fatal Attraction” after De Palma turned the job down . JASON ZINOMAN, critic at large

Less a snub than a desperate overcorrection, awarding an Oscar to Al Pacino for his shouty, florid turn in “Scent of a Woman” doesn’t smell any better now than it did then. ALEXIS SOLOSKI, reporter

I’ll never forget the evening of Feb. 27, 2011, when Jesse Eisenberg was so close to setting the record for youngest person to win best actor for his role as Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” Eisenberg’s portrayal, which swung from egotistical nerd to insecure billionaire without making the audience feel dizzy or skeptical, seemed to be a no-brainer for the win. Instead, it went to Colin Firth for his role in “The King’s Speech” — a portrayal that was good, but nowhere near as dynamic as Eisenberg’s. SHIVANI GONZALEZ, senior news assistant

For decades, Gary Oldman could call himself the best actor who never won best actor. Nothing for “True Romance,” nothing for “The Professional,” just a nod for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” — but a Churchill impersonation in a History Channel-tier biopic, instead of Daniel Day-Lewis’s crabby couturier and Timothée Chalamet’s trilingual twink? That one they thought deserved it. JASON FARAGO, critic at large

Annette Bening will get a career-crowning Oscar sooner or later (though don’t bet on “Nyad” this time), and as far as I’m concerned it’ll be penance for being left off the best actress roster for her fierce performance in “20th Century Women” (2016). The academy was off-key putting Meryl Streep in “Florence Foster Jenkins” on the list instead. SCOTT HELLER, projects editor, Book Review

Don’t be sad that Margot Robbie wasn’t nominated for “Barbie.” Be sad that she didn’t win best actress in “I, Tonya,” in 2018. I still think about her stunning performance in the film — what RogerEbert.com called “‘ GoodFellas’ on ice ” — at random times, and it just guts me. KATHLEEN MASSARA, senior staff editor

“Dances With Wolves”? Are you kidding me? It’s enough to destroy whatever credibility the academy might have had. A.O. SCOTT, critic at large, Book Review

Our Coverage of the 2024 Oscars

The 96th academy awards were presented on march 10 in los angeles..

Our Critics’ Take: The Oscars were torn between the golden past and the thorny present. But to our critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson, the show mostly worked .

A ‘Just Ken’ Spectacle: In one of the most anticipated and exuberant moments of Oscar night , Ryan Gosling took the stage to perform “ I’m Just Ken ” from “Barbie.”

Cillian Murphy’s Career: If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of the Irish actor’s work after his now Oscar-winning performance as the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, here are some excellent options .

Universal’s Success: Under the leadership of the executive Donna Langley, the studio behind “Oppenheimer” has managed the rare feat of achieving creative dominance and commercial supremacy at the same time .

Inside the After Parties: Here’s what we saw at the Governors Ball and Vanity Fair’s party , where the famous (and the fame-adjacent) celebrated into the night.

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COMMENTS

What Unites Buddhism and Psychotherapy? One ...
By Mark Epstein 320 pp. Penguin Press. $27. A version of this article appears in print on , Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Of Two Minds .
When a Therapist Puts Buddhism Into Practice
By John Williams. Jan. 18, 2018. The psychotherapist Mark Epstein is known for lucidly mapping the ways in which Buddhism can enrich Western approaches to psychology. In his books, starting with ...
12 New Books We Recommend This Week
THE ZEN OF THERAPY: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, by Mark Epstein. (Penguin Press, $27.) A warm, profound memoir of a year in the consulting room of Epstein, a psychiatrist and practicing ...
THE ZEN OF THERAPY
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s. Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton's Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a "fiercely independent" Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters.
THE TRAUMA OF EVERYDAY LIFE
A practicing physician and Buddhism expert examines trauma as a natural part of life. Psychiatrist Epstein (Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis/New York Univ.; Going on Being: Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and Psychotherapy, 2008, etc.), a prolific author on Buddhism, invites readers to learn from the example of Buddha and deal with trauma through direct engagement and Zen mindfulness rather ...
The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life
Mark Epstein, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy.He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University and is currently Clinical Assistant Professor in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University.
"The Zen of Therapy" on the cover of...
"The Zen of Therapy" on the cover of The New York Times Book Review! "A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book's lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and...
The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life
"A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book's lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy sessions with his patients to ...
The Zen of Therapy by Mark Epstein, M.D.: 9780593296639
About The Zen of Therapy "A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book's lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy ...
Advice Not Given by Mark Epstein, M.D.: 9780399564345
About Advice Not Given "Most people will never find a great psychiatrist or a great Buddhist teacher, but Mark Epstein is both, and the wisdom he imparts in Advice Not Given is an act of generosity and compassion.The book is a tonic for the ailments of our time."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth Our ego, and its accompanying sense of nagging self-doubt as ...
Mark Epstein on The Zen of Therapy
Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist and author who has written widely on the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. His best-selling books include Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, The Trauma of Everyday Life, and What the Buddha Felt.His latest work is The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life. James Shaheen is Tricycle's editor-in-chief.
Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself Hardcover
The book is a tonic for the ailments of our time." —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth "Mark Epstein's Advice Not Given continues his important, fascinating work in exceptionally lucid language. It also offers its readers a collection of fables, vignettes, and personal revelations with the true capacity to ...
Book Review: 'The Half Known Life,' by Pico Iyer
Book Review Today's Paper ... Rebecca Conway for The New York Times. By Mark Epstein. Jan. 10, 2023 ... Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in New York City. His latest book is "The Zen of Therapy ...
Jason Epstein, cofounder of 'The New York Review of Books' dies at 93
Jason Epstein, seen in 2001, co-founder of The New York Review of Books, has died at age 93. Jim Cooper/AP. NEW YORK — Jason Epstein, a publishing innovator and bon vivant who helped put the ...
Mark Epstein
Personal life. Epstein is married to the artist Arlene Shechet and has two children.. Career. Epstein is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.After completing his psychiatry residency at what is now New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, he entered the private practice of psychiatry in New York City.He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at ...
Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself
The book is a tonic for the ailments of our time." —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth "Mark Epstein's Advice Not Given continues his important, fascinating work in exceptionally lucid language. It also offers its readers a collection of fables, vignettes, and personal revelations with the true capacity to ...
The New York Times Book Review
During the Covid-19 pandemic, The New York Times Book Review is operating remotely and will accept physical submissions by request only. If you wish to submit a book for review consideration, please email a PDF of the galley at least three months prior to scheduled publication to [email protected]. . Include the publication date and any related press materials, along with links to ...
Joseph Epstein's polemic 'The Novel, Who Needs It?' misses mark
By Joseph Epstein. Encounter: 152 pages, $26. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Joseph Epstein 's ...
Jason Epstein
Jason Epstein. Jason Epstein (1928-2022) was for nearly twenty years the Editorial Director at Random House, as well as a founder of The New York Review and of the Library of America. He was the author of dozens of essays and four books, including The Great Conspiracy Trial (1970) and Eating: A Memoir (2010). (February 2022)
New York Times under fire again
The New York Times is facing fresh controversy over its influential bestseller book list after Elon Musk posted on X about a years-old lawsuit that accused the paper of tweaking its rankings accord…
The Real Lincoln Bedroom: Love in a Time of Strife
Daniel Mark Epstein's careful parsing of the Lincoln marriage interweaves the crisis-filled, mercurial career of Abraham Lincoln with an equally rocky tale of man and wife.
SNOBBERY
The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker figure prominently. The author takes the role, not of Eustace Tilley, but of a Jewish innocent in Snobland, while he confesses to a smidgen of Anglophilia. Mark the passing use of such Briticisms as "navvies," "bloody," or "a mug's game."
Book Review
The Oscars are coming up, and several of the nominated films are based on books. Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, recommends a few of them. By Gilbert Cruz, Karen Hanley and ...
Ghislaine Maxwell Appeal: Epstein Associate's Lawyers Argue for Release
Mar 12, 2024, 7:56 AM PDT. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in a photo filed as an exhibit in Maxwell's criminal trial. US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Ghislaine ...
Book excerpt: Theo Epstein used bold moves, new metrics to construct
Garciaparra had been a dynamic player for the Sox in his first seven seasons, winning two batting titles, scoring 100 or more runs on six occasions, and four times driving in 100 or more runs.
Book Review: 'Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey ...
PERVERSION OF JUSTICE The Jeffrey Epstein Story By Julie K. Brown. If you were to ask a random sampling of adults to name the worst person in America, the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein would ...
Book Review: 'James,' by Percival Everett
JAMES, by Percival Everett. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the critic Lionel Trilling wrote, is "one of the world's great books and one of the central documents of American culture ...
The Worst Oscar Snubs, According to Times Film Fans
Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in "Batman Returns," an "unhinged yet unflappable performance," according to one of our staffers, that nevertheless failed to result in an Oscar nomination ...