Joseph Epstein's new collection of essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin, and at $ 25.00, it's a steal. Epstein is one of the country's premier men of letters and (no coincidence) a contributing editor to this magazine. In the new collection, readers will find his thoughts on, among many other topics, napping, Anglophilia, and heart bypass surgery -- a combination that makes the book must reading not only for sleepy hospital patients with funny accents but everyone else, too. About it, and him, Tom Wolfe has written: "He moves so effortlessly from the amusingly personal to the broadly philosophical that it takes a moment before you realize how far out into the intellectual cosmos you have been taken. He is also mercilessly free of the petty intellectual etiquettes common at this moment in our national letters. It is refreshing to hear so independent a voice." Seconded.