Lopate - Portrait inside my head: essays

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Phillip Lopate is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre , and Portrait of My Body ; and Waterfront . He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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ALSO BY PHILLIP LOPATE

To Show and To Tell

At the End of the Day

Notes on Sontag

Two Marriages

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now

Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan

Rudy Burckhardt

Getting Personal: Selected Writings

Writing New York: A Literary Anthology

Totally, Tenderly, Tragically

Portrait of My Body

The Art of the Personal Essay:
An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

Against Joie de Vivre

The Rug Merchant

Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis

Confessions of Summer

The Daily Round

The Eyes Dont Always Want to Stay Open

Being with Children: A High-Spirited Personal Account
of Teaching Writing, Theater, and Videotape

Praise for Portrait Inside My Head

Immensely readable essays... As riveting as short stories, with arresting openings, sculptured scenes worthy of fiction, introspective passages fingering his own feelings, and haunting conclusions that resonate....What holds it together is an engaging voice, the projection of a curious, appealingly modest, sometimes self-mocking character behind that voice, and the the fluent play of a single consciousness. Hes gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional.... [Lopate] remains a storyteller at heart who can liven up any subject with nimble anecdotes from his life.... Delightful.

The New York Times Book Review

Lopate does the essay proud. He is elegant in style and a real slugger when it comes to content.Lopate is an ardent, shrewd urban chronicler, piquantly incisive in analyzing film and literature and unnervingly candid and combative in addressing intimate relationships, sexual performance, and his loving rivalry with his brother, Lenny, the well-known New York radio host[An] ensnaring book.

Booklist

Esteemed essayist and poet Lopate offers a motley collection of essays, personal and critical... Readers are well-rewarded for his obsession.

Kirkus

Phillip Lopate is one of the greatest essayists of our time, and Portrait Inside My Head proves it again. His writing is provocative, intimate, intellectually curious, clear-eyed, and funny as hell. Hes a fearless, exquisitely aware chronicler of thought and feeling. Being Phillip Lopate, hed probably also be skeptical about so much praise, but in this case hed be totally (tenderly, tragically) wrong.

Sam Lipsyte , author of The Ask and The Fun Parts

Its impossible to overestimate how completely Phillip Lopates anthology The Art of the Personal Essay reframed and revivified the personal essay for contemporary American writers and readers. In his new collection of essays, Portrait Inside My Head , Lopate demonstrates his own immense virtues as an essayisthis ceaseless ability to think against himself.

David Shields , author of How Literature Saved My Life on Portrait Inside My Head

Few living writers have done as much to shape the contemporary essay as Phillip Lopate, but hes clearly not done. Portrait Inside My Head is a welcome reminder of how good he is as an essayist and how vital he makes the form, in all its miscellany, reverie, sparkle, and spectacle. Memoir is for suckers. The essay isand these essays definitely arewhere the jams at.

Ander Monson , author of Vanishing Point on Portrait Inside My Head

Theres something tremendously absorbent about Phillip Lopates essays.... The reading experience he assembles for us always commands my attention like the wise and mysterious shrug of someone smart.

Eileen Myles , author of The Importance of Being Iceland on Portrait Inside My Head

The personal essay is one of the most intellectually satisfying and most entertaining literary forms that we have in our day and age and Phillip Lopate is its undisputed master.

Charles Simic , author of Selected Poems on Portrait Inside My Head

Phillip Lopates new collection of essays is refreshingly, delightfully, and justifiably acerbic, a miscellany that consistently delivers thoughtful and touching insights that sway from sadness to hilarity, to tenderness, grumpiness, exasperation, etcetera. The result is not only a portrait of whats going on inside Lopates head, but of the mechanisms of essaying that have made this genre vibrant for millennia. Essay doesnt look as cool as some other words do on coffee mugs or tote bags, but its legacy is one that doesnt need a lot of bling. Pardon my potty mouth, but it takes balls to insist on eschewing the momentary fads that grab attention, and to vigorously align oneself instead with an art form that has fallen out of fashion. Its a risk that hes taken on behalf of the essay for more than thirty years. God bless Phillip Lopates balls.

John DAgata , author of Lifespan of a Fact

Praise for Phillip Lopate

Lopate is a critic who itches to get at the heart of the matter, often by unconventional means The writing, in short, works, yielding persistently fresh insights and feelings that are grounded in vividly rendered experience.

The Seattle Times

Phillip Lopate is the storyteller you sit next to on the bus or the plane, the person with whom youre casually drawn into conversation and the next thing you know three hours have passed and its time to part His is the voice you listen to.

CNN.com

[Lopate] is always teasing, luring and guiding us with cinematic clarity into a world of sight and sound We feel the push and pull of ambition, desire and aging.

The New York Times Book Review

Lopate is both legatee and guardian of the genre.

Publishers Weekly

A major national literary figure whose whimsical prose style and analytical approach rival in quality the work of Didion, Sontag, and Vidal.

Newsday

Phillip Lopate has made himself into one of our best personal essayists.

Dallas Morning News

The house authority on the genre and its best practitioner.

Washington Times

Lopate is a fantastic writerhumane, wry, and always astonishingly willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbiotic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created.

Ann Beattie

Note: Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.