"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 .
He is the author and editor of numerous books including Portrait Inside My Head: Essays , To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction , and Notes on Sontag..
About author(s): Phillip Lopate is the director of the nonfiction graduate program and teaches writing at Columbia University.
He is the editor of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now and has published two novels and numerous nonfiction collections, including Portrait of My Body and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically.
Phillip Lopate is a professor of English at Hofstra University and teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School, and Bennington.
This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary Personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.
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.
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.
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. "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
