Description
Reader, you have in your hands a motley collection of essays, personal and critical. The advantage of the heterogeneous essay collection by a single author is that it shows you how a particular mind moves through the world. If you are attracted to an essayist's mentality and way of speaking, ideally you can surrender happily to his or her take on various subject matters, the more diverse the better. Let us see how our author will tackle this particular memory, neurotic tic, political or social problem, book, movie, play, comic strip, rock band, without requiring an over-arching theme. If there is a consistent theme in this particular collection, it is the discovery of limitations, and learning to live with them. The recognition of one's limits, painful as it may be, can have salutary side-effects.In my case, it absolves me of the need to be both a hero and a coward, an explorer and a stay-at-home, a saint and a villain, a loyal husband and a Don Juan, a political activist and a skeptic, a spiritual mystic and a rationalist atheist, a performing athlete and a sports fan, a great if excruciatingly self-demanding literary stylist and a prolific if merely good-enough writer.
About the Author
Phillip Lopate is an essayist, novelist and poet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections - Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre and Portrait of My Body; a critical study, Notes on Sontag; and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Reviews
'Hilarious and tender ... Meandering merrily along in the footsteps of the great classical essayists Montaigne and William Hazlitt, acclaimed cultural critic Lopate traipses breezily through family life and literary, cultural, social, and political matters ... with his typical elegance and peripatetic curiosity.' - Publishers Weekly 'What holds it together is an engaging voice, the projection of a curious, appealingly modest, sometimes self-mocking character behind that voice, and "the fluent play of a single consciousness." He's gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional.' - The New York Times Book Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781907903960
Author Phillip Lopate
Format Hardback
Page Count 254
Imprint Notting Hill Editions
Publisher Notting Hill Editions
Weight(grams) 250g
Dimensions(mm) 190mm * 120mm * 20mm
About the Author
Phillip Lopate is an essayist, novelist and poet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections - Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre and Portrait of My Body; a critical study, Notes on Sontag; and To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Reviews
'Hilarious and tender ... Meandering merrily along in the footsteps of the great classical essayists Montaigne and William Hazlitt, acclaimed cultural critic Lopate traipses breezily through family life and literary, cultural, social, and political matters ... with his typical elegance and peripatetic curiosity.' - Publishers Weekly 'What holds it together is an engaging voice, the projection of a curious, appealingly modest, sometimes self-mocking character behind that voice, and "the fluent play of a single consciousness." He's gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional.' - The New York Times Book Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781907903960
Author Phillip Lopate
Format Hardback
Page Count 254
Imprint Notting Hill Editions
Publisher Notting Hill Editions
Weight(grams) 250g
Dimensions(mm) 190mm * 120mm * 20mm
