Phillip Lopate Books In Order

Novels

  1. Confessions of Summer (1979)
  2. The Rug Merchant (1987)

Collections

  1. The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (1972)
  2. Two Marriages (2008)

Non fiction

  1. Being With Children (1975)
  2. The Art of the Essay, 1999 (1980)
  3. Bachelorhood (1981)
  4. Against Joie de Vivre (1989)
  5. The Ordering Mirror (1993)
  6. The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)
  7. Portrait of My Body (1996)
  8. The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1997 (1997)
  9. Close to the Bone (1998)
  10. The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1998 (1998)
  11. Totally, Tenderly, Tragically (1998)
  12. Bridge of Dreams (1999)
  13. Lopate Essays (1999)
  14. Getting Personal (2003)
  15. Rudy Burckhardt (2004)
  16. Waterfront (2005)
  17. Notes on Sontag (2009)
  18. Portrait Inside My Head (2013)
  19. To Show and to Tell (2013)
  20. A Mother’s Tale (2017)
  21. The Glorious American Essay (2020)
  22. The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 (2021)
  23. The Contemporary American Essay (2021)

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Phillip Lopate Books Overview

Two Marriages

Selected as one of Oprah. com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads

Celebrated essayist Phillip Lopate proves himself a master of the short novel form in this inspired pairing of novellas portraying two less than perfect unions. The Stoic’s Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Well off, idle Gordon, a lifelong student of philosophy who has always had “a stunted capacity for happiness,” first meets the enchanting Rita when she comes to his home as a nurse’s aid sent to care for his dying mother. The attraction is instant and a marriage proposal ensues. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he’s adopted as his “substitute religion.” When Rita’s cousin from the Philippines arrives one Christmas, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon’s stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test.

Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends. It is Saturday morning, and Frank and Eleanor are planning the dinner they will host to celebrate the visit of a famous actor friend. These preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank’s son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.

Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit.

Being With Children

In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into an urban school to teach poetry and became a part of the school community. Being With Children, first published in 1975 but out of print for many years, is Lopate’s classic account of his relationship to his craft and to his young students. Hailed by the New York Times as ‘a wise and tender portrait of a small society,’ Lopate’s book explores the horrible and beautiful aspects of being with young people five hours a day, and explains why teachers persist in staying with the public schools and trying to make them into places where young people can flower.

The Art of the Essay, 1999

Now in its third year, this annual collection presents the most notable, influential, and surprising essays published in the last twelve months in either books or periodicals throughout the English speaking world. Selected with consummate taste and a catholic openness to style and subject matter by famed essayist, critic, and editor, Phillip Lopate, the 1999 edition demonstrates that the form continues its renaissance as an unrivaled vehicle of intelligence and sensibility. For this edition, Lopate has paired his tewnty eight selections by topic, which offers suprising parallels and divergences in points of view. Andre Dubus and Tom Beller on apprentice work as a form of true experience; Richard Rorty and George Packer on the quixotic and often self defeating character of the American left; Siri Hustvedt and Wayne Koestenbaum on the verities of erotic experience; Bliss Broyard and M. G. Stephens on their fathers; Marcus Laffey and Charles Bowden on violence, crime, and police work; Susan Sontag and Martha Nussbaum on the necessity and consolation of art these are just some of the peerless practitioners of the essay featured in this superb collection. All of this exciting new work is placed in context by an equally superb introductory essay by Lopate. A special feature of this 1999 edition is an appendix in which literary and intellectual notables nominate their selections of the best and most influential essays and essayists of the century. This prestigious Anchor annual is more than ever an unequaled showcase for an indispensable and ever changing literary form.

Against Joie de Vivre

Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live, begins the title essay by Phillip Lopate. This rejoinder to the cult of hedonism and forced conviviality moves from a critique of the false sentimentalization of children and the elderly to a sardonic look at the social rite of the dinner party, on to a moving personal testament to the hungry soul. Lopate’s special gift is his ability to give us not only sophisticated cultural commentary in a dazzling collection of essays but also to bring to his subjects an engaging honesty and openness that invite us to experience the world along with him. Also included here are Lopate s inspiring account of his production of Chekhov s Uncle Vanya with a group of preadolescents, a look at the tradition of the personal essay, and a soul searching piece on the suicide of a schoolteacher and its effect on his students and fellow teachers. By turns humorous, learned, celebratory, and elegiac, Lopate displays a keen intelligence and a flair for language that turn bits of common, everyday life into resonant narrative. This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.

The Ordering Mirror

In 1977, Bennington College alumna Edith Barbour Andrews established the Ben Belitt Lectureships in gratitude to her teacher Ben Belitt and dedicated the publication of the lectures in the form of chapbooks to the memory of William Troy, another of her beloved teachers. The collection, published here in one volume, comprises lectures by some of the most inspiring writers and keenest critics of our time. In his introduciton to The Ordering Mirror, Phillip Lopate contrasts the anticipations and the audience/lecturer dynamic inherent in attending yearly lecture, with the experience of reading them, and the opportunity for reflection and comparison. Lopate summarizes that, It is enough to appreciate that we are watching masters of the game of essay writing, who, even as they comment on the masterpieces of other writers, practice their own wizardry. The volume includes: George Steiner, The Uncommon Reader1978Frank Kermode, Divination1979Harold Bloom, To the Tally of My Soul: Whitman’s Image of Voice1980Denis Donoghue, The Politics of Modern Criticism1981Irving Howe, The Making of a Critic1982Richard Ellman, The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce1983Bernard Malamud, Long Work, Short Life1984Ben Belitt, Literature and Belief: Three ‘Spiritual Exercises’1985Saul Bellow, Summations1987Hugh Kenner, Magics and Spells about curses, charms, and riddles1987Richard Rorty, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty1988Rene Girard, Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar1989Nadine Gordimer, Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals and Politics1990Seamus Heaney, Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas1992Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew1992

The Art of the Personal Essay

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 seizes on the minutiae of daily life vanities, fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, taking a walk to offer insight into the human condition and the great social and political issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this fertile genre. By presenting more than seventy five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays the tradition of the personal essay in all its historical grandeur, depth, and diversity.

Portrait of My Body

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 the form in his acclaimed anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate demonstrates here just how far a writer can go in the direction of honesty and risk taking. In thirteen essays, Lopate explores the resources and limits of the self, its many disguises, excuses, and unmaskings, with his characteristic wry humor and insight. From the title essay, a hilarious physical self exam, to the haunting portrait of his ex colleague Donald Barthelme, to the bittersweet account of his long delayed surrender to marriage, ‘On Leaving Bachelorhood,’ Lopate wrestles with finding the proper balance between detachment and empathy, doubt and conviction. In other essays, he celebrates his love of film and city life, and reflects on his religious identity as a Jew. A wrenchingly vivid, unforgettable portrait of the author’s eccentric, solipsistic, aged father, a self proclaimed failure, is the centerpiece of a suite of essays about father figures and resisted mentors. The book ends with the author’s own introduction to fatherhood, as witness to the birth of his daughter. A book that will engage readers with its conversational eloquence, skeptical intelligence, candor, and mischief, Portrait of My Body is a captivating work of literary nonfiction.

The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1997

Anchor Books proudly launches an annual essay series. Acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate has selected the most surprising, important, and exquisite pieces published during the last twelve months. Bringing together materials from both periodicals and books, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 also includes essays never before published, as well as translations from abroad. The result is as rich and unique as it is cosmopolitan. In her brilliantly frank ‘Revelation’, Mary Gaitskill recounts the religious epiphany that changed her life. Hilton Als explores the ‘Negressity’ of his soul in ‘My Pin Up’. In his dazzling ‘The Laying Off of Desire’, Jean Baudrillard sets forth a flamboyant dissection of human sexuality. Hubert Butler ruminates on the stunted life of his handicapped grandchild in ‘Little K.’ We relive the glories and disappointments of the Borscht Belt in Vivian Gornick’s evocative group portrait, ‘The Catskills Remembered’. And we ride a rollercoaster of cultural insight in Daniel Harris’s ‘A Psychosexual History of the Homosexual Body’. A a whole, this superb collection is a heady cocktail indeed. All of this exciting new work is placed in context with an illuminating introduction from Phillip Lopate, ‘the house authority on the genre and its greatest practitioner’ Washington Times. With generous selections from over twenty five writers from around the world, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 is the first in what is sure to become a series widely anticipated and highly acclaimed, every October, for years to come.

Close to the Bone

As the memoir eclipses fiction, here is the first anthology to define this burgeoning genre. In ‘Close to the Bone‘, award winning critic Laurie Stone has created an astonishing anthology of memoirs in which eight acclaimed writers go about the risky business of telling their own secrets, scouting the territories of sex, the family, loneliness, the city, addiction and AIDS.

Totally, Tenderly, Tragically

Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school’s first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.

Bridge of Dreams

Noted Turkish American artist Burhan Dogencay photographed the heroic ironworkers involved in the restoration of this landmark. With an introduction by noted New York writer Lopate, this suite of magical images is reproduced in rich duotone from the original platinum prints.

Getting Personal

From the man whose name is synonymous with the contemporary personal essay, Getting Personal is a rich and ambitious collection that spans Phillip Lopate’s career as an essayist, teacher, film critic, father, son, and husband. Witty, insightful, deeply meditative, and self revelatory, with his characteristic candor and curmudgeonly charm, he explores himself, his life, his family, his religion, and his friends.

Rudy Burckhardt

Rudolph Rudy Burckhardt 1914 1999 was born in Basel, Switzerland, and immigrated to the United States in 1935, hoping to forge a career in photography. By the 1940s, he had begun to create a series of now classic photographs of New York, which uniquely capture the energy and chaotic beauty of the city. Burckhardt soon became well known in New York art circles, and began to photograph the great New York artists of the time, creating legendary portraits of icons like de Kooning and Pollock. Gradually, he became an important cultural force in his own right, not only as a photographer, but also as a maker of underground films, and, later in life, as a painter. This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Burckhardt’s photographs. It includes not only his New York street scenes and his artists’ portraits, but also his views of European cities, studies of children and the female nude, and views of the natural world. The range and brilliance of Burckhardt’s work have only begun to become known outside the inner circle of his creative associates. This book will help redress that lack of recognition it is a feast for the eyes of anyone who loves good photography.

Waterfront

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan’s Waterfront are both celebrated and secret hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city s soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates Captain Kidd and power brokers Robert Moses, the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville s and Whitman s day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today s developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

Notes on Sontag

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, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate’s account of Sontag’s significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle class California to invent herself as a European style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate’s engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

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