For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay seizes on the minutiae of daily life-vanities, fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, taking a walk -- to offer insight into the human condition and the great social and political issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this fertile genre. By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays the tradition of the personal essay in all its historical grandeur, depth, and diversity.

"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time." -Amazon.

Fusing history, lore, politics, culture, and on-site adventures, Lopate takes us on an exuberant and eye-opening excursion around Manhattan¿s shoreline. This book captures the ever-changing character of New York on a series of exploratory walks conducted by one of the city¿s most knowledgeable guides. Starting at the Battery and moving along the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers, he describes the infrastructures, public spaces, and landmarks, 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 along the shorelines. Ill.

The essays in Phillip Lopate's new book record an ardent three-decades-plus love affair with the movies; like Michel Piccoli with Brigitte Bardot in Godard's "Contempt," he is "totally, tenderly, tragically" besotted with the cinema. Artfully braiding emotional and intellectual autobiography with critical and historical commentary, these essays exemplify and record a passionate engagement with an irreplaceable art form, its creators, and its critics. Lopate evaluates those filmmakers who have most affected him since his days as a nascent film cultist at Columbia: Antonioni, Godard, Bresson, Mizoguchi, Fassbinder, Ozu, and Visconti. He celebrates Andrew Sarris as the film critic who first won his heart and provides an eye-opening extended portrait and fondly skeptical critique of Pauline Kael, the most influential film writer of our time. And in essays such as "The Last Taboo: The Dumbing Down of American Movies, " he addresses the elusive question of whether movies can actually think. With his full-hearted affection and bracing intelligence, Phillip Lopate captures, as few others have, the insistent allure of films and filmgoing.

Anchor Books proudly launches an annual essay series. Acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate has selected the most surprising, important, and exquisite pieces published during the last twelve months. Bringing together materials from both periodicals and books, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 also includes essays never before published, as well as translations from abroad. The result is as rich and unique as it is cosmopolitan. In her brilliantly frank "Revelation", Mary Gaitskill recounts the religious epiphany that changed her life. Hilton Als explores the "Negressity" of his soul in "My Pin-Up". In his dazzling "The Laying Off of Desire", Jean Baudrillard sets forth a flamboyant dissection of human sexuality. Hubert Butler ruminates on the stunted life of his handicapped grandchild in "Little K." We relive the glories and disappointments of the Borscht Belt in Vivian Gornick's evocative group portrait, "The Catskills Remembered". And we ride a rollercoaster of cultural insight in Daniel Harris's "A Psychosexual History of the Homosexual Body". A a whole, this superb collection is a heady cocktail indeed. All of this exciting new work is placed in context with an illuminating introduction from Phillip Lopate, "the house authority on the genre and its greatest practitioner" ( Washington Times ). With generous selections from over twenty-five writers from around the world, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 is the first in what is sure to become a series widely anticipated and highly acclaimed, every October, for years to come.