Portrait Inside My Head: Essays

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Overview

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 ...

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Philip Lopate once wrote that his prose style drifted in and out of beauty. In this new collection of essays, one is grateful for those adroit meanderings; Lopate never allowing us to forget that fine prose comes in many colors. Thus, The Portrait Inside My Head contains pieces both unpretentiously personal and reflectively critical. Nevertheless, Lopate never quite convince us that he is, as he insists, truly cynical; his deep, humane interest in the world around belies that claim, for which readers can be truly grateful.

The New York Times Book Review - Morris Dickstein
[Lopate's] gods are Montaigne, the father of the essay, whose field of research was his own mind, and William Hazlitt, who, besides being an incomparable literary critic, sketched vehement novelistic impressions of what no one else thought worth noticing…What holds [Portrait Inside My Head] 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. Again and again Lopate writes less about a stable subject than about his own constantly evolving views of it.
Publishers Weekly
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 in this collection of mostly previously published essays. With his typical elegance and peripatetic curiosity, Lopate ranges over topics from the adventures of parenting, his enduring love of baseball, and changing one’s mind about a movie to a thoughtful mediation on the conflict between city planner Robert Moses and city champion Jane Jacobs along with meditations on James Agee, Thomas Bernhard, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. In a hilarious and tender essay, he describes taking his young daughter to tea at the Plaza Hotel, simply because he and his wife wanted to provide their daughter with a quintessential Manhattan event: “We were bound and determined to give her all the social graces and sophisticated experiences that befit her, if not our, station in life.” Lopate describes the terror and despair of their daughter’s unexplainable illness and their relentless stays in the hospital, and he affirms the beleaguered sense of gratitude that shines through the fear: “If because of her I was obliged to enter the Kingdom of Anxiety, such is the lot of all parents, and a small price to pay for the plenitude of her being.” Lopate praises the design of the High Line park in New York “as good as things get these days,” and he expresses his happiness with “any new public space that worked, in this era of relentless privatization.” Throughout these essays, Lopate admits jauntily and gracefully that he writes to exist and that taking “the most provocative positions that clash with conventional morality is child’s play next to the difficulty of getting through daily domestic life.” Agent: Wendy Weil, the Wendy Weil Agency. (Feb.)
Booklist
“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.”
author of The Ask and The Fun Parts - Sam Lipsyte
“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. He’s a fearless, exquisitely aware chronicler of thought and feeling. Being Phillip Lopate, he’d probably also be skeptical about so much praise, but in this case he’d be totally (tenderly, tragically) wrong.”
author of How Literature Saved My Life - David Shields
“It’s impossible to overestimate how completely Phillip Lopate’s 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 essayist—his ceaseless ability to “think against” himself."
author of Vanishing Point - Ander Monson
“Few living writers have done as much to shape the contemporary essay as Phillip Lopate, but he’s 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 is—and these essays definitely are—where the jam’s at.”
author of The Importance of Being Iceland - Eileen Myles
“There’s something tremendously absorbent about Phillip Lopate’s essays. . . . The reading experience he assembles for us always commands my attention like the wise and mysterious shrug of someone smart.”
author of Selected Poems - Charles Simic
“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.”
author of Lifespan of a Fact - John D'Agata
“Phillip Lopate's 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 what's going on inside Lopate's head, but of the mechanisms of essaying that have made this genre vibrant for millennia. "Essay" doesn't look as cool as some other words do on coffee mugs or tote bags, but its legacy is one that doesn't 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. It's a risk that he's taken on behalf of the essay for more than thirty years. God bless Phillip Lopate's balls.”
The New York Times Book Review
“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.” He’s 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.”
San Francisco Book Review (4 stars)
"An engaging collection of personal essays. . . . [Lopate] draws you in, playcing you in his writing space, and you feel his impatience to get to the page and draw you into his mind and through his world."
Christian Science Monitor
"A connoisseur of the personal essay. . . [Lopate's] style and mileu are reminiscent of novels by Henry Roth and early Saul Bellow."
Baltimore City Paper
"Phillip Lopate is America's Montaigne, bringing the same sense of moderation, warmth, and curiousity to the personal essay."
From the Publisher
“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.” He’s 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.”

"An engaging collection of personal essays. . . . [Lopate] draws you in, playcing you in his writing space, and you feel his impatience to get to the page and draw you into his mind and through his world."

"A connoisseur of the personal essay. . . [Lopate's] style and mileu are reminiscent of novels by Henry Roth and early Saul Bellow."

"Phillip Lopate is America's Montaigne, bringing the same sense of moderation, warmth, and curiousity to the personal essay."

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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. He’s a fearless, exquisitely aware chronicler of thought and feeling. Being Phillip Lopate, he’d probably also be skeptical about so much praise, but in this case he’d be totally (tenderly, tragically) wrong.”

“It’s impossible to overestimate how completely Phillip Lopate’s 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 essayist—his ceaseless ability to “think against” himself."

“Few living writers have done as much to shape the contemporary essay as Phillip Lopate, but he’s 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 is—and these essays definitely are—where the jam’s at.”

Kirkus Reviews
Esteemed essayist and poet Lopate (At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay, 2010, etc.) offers "a motley collection of essays, personal and critical," loosely tied together around the theme of "the discovery of limitations, and learning to live with them." The author divides the essays into sections devoted to family, daily life, city spaces and literary concerns. Yet there is a single "sensibility flowing through disparate subject matters," that of the good-humored cynic and gentle contrarian. In the first essay, the simple event of Lopate's daughter losing a balloon presents evidence that life is, in the end, "loss, futility, and ineluctable sorrow." In another essay, the author concludes that being a baseball fan "means learning to absorb failure and be on a friendly footing with defeat." And so it goes through essays on sex, marriage, film, writing, politics, the Bible and more. Lopate leaves behind at times the purely personal with telling essays on film and literature. He moves from revisiting Ginsberg's Howl to thoughts on a wide variety of writers, including Charles Reznikoff, Leonard Michaels, Stendhal and others. No matter the topic, however, another constant throughout is fine writing; the words Lopate chooses are the only words that will do. "The interruptive nocturne of clinics" perfectly captures nights on the pediatric ward where his daughter spent so much of her infancy. Brooklyn, he muses in a paean to his beloved hometown, has "a touch of the amateur, voluntary, homemade about the place." In a concluding essay, Lopate confesses that writing is his life. Readers are well-rewarded for his obsession. A master class on the pleasures of the English language well-wrought--a useful complement to his guide on writing literary nonfiction, To Show and to Tell, which will publish simultaneously.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781451695861
  • Publisher: Free Press
  • Publication date: 2/12/2013
  • Pages: 304
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Phillip Lopate

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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