A Word or Two Before I Go

Lauded by the critics Dana Gioia, Morris Dickstein, Edward Mendelson, Christopher Hitchens, Joseph Epstein, and Michael Dirda alike, Arthur Krystal has written for publications as varied as Harper’s, the New Criterion, Raritan, the American Scholar, and Sports Illustrated. In characteristically lucid prose, Krystal offers here—if he is to be believed—his last collection. These eleven essays and one evocative story range in subject matter from the depredations of aging and the anomalies of cultural appropriation to the friendship between Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling and the day Muhammad Ali punched Krystal in the face.