"Phillip Lopate is a lifelong movie-lover-and an award-winning essayist-so it was perhaps inevitable that he would write so much on film. Coming of age, cinematically speaking, in the early 1960s, Lopate immersed himself in the films of the French New Wave, the Italian Neorealists, and directors such as Satyji Ray and Akira Kurosawa, and American independent filmmakers like John Cassavettes and Shirley Clarke. The formal qualities and innovation he found in many of those films along with their emotional intensity have continued to set the bar for Lopate's viewing and his interest in what he terms, art house cinema as well as classic Hollywood films given new life in retrospectives. In My Affair with Art House Cinema, Phillip Lopate writes about those movies that have most captivated him over the past twenty-five years upon rewatching or watching for the first time. He discusses films by leading global contemporary filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, Youssef Chahine, Claire Denis, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Lena Dunham, David Cronenberg, Jafar Panahi, Hong Sang-soo Hou Hsaio-hsien, and Chantal Akerman. He also returns to the works of older filmmakers ranging from Godard and Ozu to John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. Throughout these essays, Lopate's critiques and celebration of a wide variety of films convey the excitement and appreciation for the visceral pleasures and profound insight that movies offer"--

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.

"A compelling record of one year in the life of a writer, including observations about movies, art, music, friendship, travel, and family. The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarastomi, the resistable rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be"--