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Published Feb 2013
304 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. 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." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - 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. 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." - Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts
"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." - David Shields, author of How Literature Saved My Life
"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." - Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point
"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." - Eileen Myles, author of The Importance of Being Iceland
"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
This information about Portrait Inside My Head was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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