Phillip Lopate – författare

Finalist, 2025 PEN / Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, PEN AmericaPhillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes.In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.

Finalist, 2025 PEN / Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, PEN AmericaPhillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes.In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.

Fusing history, lore, politics, culture, and on-site adventures, esteemed essayist and author Phillip Lopate takes us on an exuberant, affectionate, and eye-opening excursion around Manhattan’s shoreline. Waterfront captures the ever-changing character of New York in the best way possible: on a series of exploratory walks conducted by one of the city’s most engaging and knowledgeable guides. Starting at the Battery and moving at a leisurely pace along the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers, Lopate describes the infrastructures, public spaces, and landmarks he encounters, along with fascinating insights into how they came to be. Unpeeling layers of myth and history, he reveals the economic, ecological, and political concerns that influenced the city’s development, reporting on everything from the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the latest projects dotting the shorelines.New York’s waterfront has undergone a three-stage revaluation—from the world’s largest port to an abandoned, seedy no-man’s land to a highly desirable zone of parks and upscale retail and residential properties—each metamorphosis only incompletely shedding earlier associations. Physically, no area of New York City has changed as dramatically as the shoreline, thanks to natural processes and the use of landfill, dredging, and other interventions. Everywhere Phillip Lopate walked on the waterfront, he saw the present as a layered accumulation of older narratives. He set about his task by trying to read the city like a text. One textual layer is the past, going back to the Lenape Indians, Captain Kidd, and Melville’s sailors; another is the present—whatever or whoever was popping up in his view at the moment; a third layer contains the constructed environment, the architecture or piers or parks currently along the shore; another layer still is his personal history, the memories recalled by visiting certain spots; yet another consists of the city’s incredibly rich cultural record—the literature, films, and artwork that threw a reflecting light on the matter at hand; and finally, there is the invisible or imagined layer—what he thinks should be on the waterfront but is not.Waterfront is studded with short diversions where Lopate expounds on some of the greater issues, characters, and sites of Manhattan’s shoreline. Be it a revisionist examination of Robert Moses, the effect of shipworms on the city’s piers and foundations, the battle over Westway, the dream of public housing, the legacy of Joseph Mitchell, a wonderful passage about the longshoremen and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, or the meaning of the World Trade Center, Lopate punctuates this marvelous journey with the sights and sounds and words of a world like no other. A rich and impressive work by an undisputed master stylist, Waterfront takes its rightful place next to other literary classics of New York, such as E. B. White’s Here Is New York and Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel. It is an unparalleled look at New York’s landscape and history and an irresistible invitation to meander along its outermost edges.From the Hardcover edition.

A richly textured portrait of an American man of letters who came to exemplify the writer’s life with all its setbacks and triumphsWashington Irving (1783–1859) is often considered America’s first professional writer, supporting himself and his family amid the ups and downs of literary fortune. He burst on the scene with his uproarious History of New York, followed by his Sketch Book, a collection of personal essays and short stories that includes “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” As an essayist and teacher, Phillip Lopate identifies with Irving, inspired by his humane and elegant prose style, and by Irving’s courage and persistence in the face of setbacks and his own limitations as a writer.In this illuminating book, Lopate reflects on Irving and his extensive body of work through a series of warmly sympathetic sketches of his own. Irving was the first American writer to attain international renown, attracting such devoted fans as Charles Dickens and Lord Byron, and while he may have been overrated in his day, he has since become undeservedly neglected. A lifelong bachelor, he was urbane, popular, and socially adept, mixing with royals as well as paupers, yet underneath it all he was a loner and a melancholic. Lopate describes how Irving constantly reinvented himself, first as a satirist, then a belletrist, at times a hack writer, and finally as a serious biographer of figures like George Washington and the Prophet Muhammad. Along the way, he explains why minor writers like Irving have their enduring fascinations.Delving into all that is likable and perplexing about the man once considered America’s most famous writer, A Washington Irving Sketch Book brings Irving closer to today’s readers, capturing the charm of his work and the vicissitudes of literary fashion.

"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.

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 Reader" (1978)Frank Kermode, "Divination" (1979)Harold Bloom, "To the Tally of My Soul: Whitman's Image of Voice" (1980)Denis Donoghue, "The Politics of Modern Criticism" (1981)Irving Howe, "The Making of a Critic" (1982)Richard Ellman, "The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce" (1983)Bernard Malamud, "Long Work, Short Life" (1984)Ben Belitt, "Literature and Belief: Three 'Spiritual Exercises'" (1985)Saul Bellow, "Summations" (1987)Hugh Kenner, "Magics and Spells (about curses, charms, and riddles)" (1987)Richard Rorty, "The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty" (1988)Rene Girard, "Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" (1989)Nadine Gordimer, "Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals and Politics" (1990)Seamus Heaney, "Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas" (1992)Cynthia Ozick, "What Henry James Knew" (1992)

Published in 1981, Bachelorhood was Lopate’s personal experiences as an unmarried man in the big city. Specifically he explores four themes of bachelor life: relationships with women and love; the observer; friendship—with those both married and single; and the artist and thinking man. Entertaining, though provoking and occasionally even heartbreaking, Bachelorhood is a fantastic collection of essays.

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 extraordinary look at New York’s storied past and present. Opening with his family life, Lopate invites us first into his rough-and-tumble childhood on the streets of Brooklyn, learning the all-important art of cowardice. From there, he takes us to the ball game to discuss the trouble with ex–baseball fans; to high tea at the Plaza; to the theater to dissect Virginia Woolf ’s opinion that  film should keep its hands off literature; and to visit his brother, radio personality Leonard Lopate, offering a rare glimpse into the unique sibling rivalry between two men at the top of their fields. Throughout this rich, ambitious, deliciously readable collection, Lopate’s easy, conversational style pushes his piercing insights to new depths, celebrating the life of the mind—its triumphs and limitations—and illuminating memories and feelings both distant and immediate. The result is a charming and spirited new book from the undisputed master of the form.

A long-awaited and illuminating book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, professor of writing at Columbia University, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay.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, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.