For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay s[...]
Phillip Lopate's richest and most ambitious book yet--the final volume of a trilogy that began with Bachelorhood and Against Joie de Vivre--Portrait of My Body is a powerful memoir in the form of interconnected personal essays. One of America's foremost essayists, who helped focus attention on[...]
"Notes on Sontag" is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the 'foremost interpreters of...our recent contemporary moment.' Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, [...]
"In this stunning new collection "of personal essays, distinguished author Phillip Lopate weaves together the colorful threads of a life well lived and brings us on an invigorating and thoughtful journey through memory, culture, parenthood, the trials of marriage both young and old, and an extra[...]
In this stunning collection of personal essays chosen as one of "The New Yorke"r's "Books to Watch Out For," distinguished author Phillip Lopate weaves together the colorful threads of a life well lived and brings us on an invigorating and thoughtful journey through memory, culture, parenthood, the [...]
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology "The Art of the Personal Essay, "is universally acclaimed as "one of our best personal essayists" ("Dallas Morning News"). Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, h[...]
An anthology of unparalleled scope, "American Movie Critics" charts the rise of movies as art, industry, and mass entertainment. Here are the great movie critics who forged a forceful new vernacular idiom for talking about the new art, ?Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Richard Schickel, Pauline Kael, Andr[...]
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[...]
Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive subversive and entertaining American authors of the last half of the twentieth century. The cinematic adaptations of Dicka's fiction have generated so much interest since Blade Runnera's 1982 release that a comprehensive assessment of these films is necess[...]
AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL
Virginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm "the prince" of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his "whim of iron" and "cleverness amounting to genius," while Beerbohm himself noted that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously." From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s [...]