Although Arthur Krystal shies away from the title of essayist, his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Moreover, such dissimilar critics as Dana Gioia, Morris Dickstein, Edward Mendelson, Christopher Hitchens, and Joseph Epstein have all lauded his work. And his first book, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. Accolades aside, Krystal simply regards himself as someone who writes sentences to see where they take him. In A Word or Two Before I Go, Krystal offers us—if he is to be believed—his final 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.
"An essayist, besides being able to write, should possess 'a well-stocked mind,' leaving open the question of what it is stocked with. Consider, for example, Arthur Krystal's A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now, which opens with a pleasing air of wry despondency. . . . This Eeyore-like plangency runs softly throughout Krystal's pages but dominates the superb 'Old News: Why We Can't Tell
