A Year and a Day

An Experiment in Essays

Phillip Lopate

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English

New York Review Books
10 October 2023

Literature: history & criticism

A compelling celebration of the power of the essay, this collection of 47 writings offers a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Montaigne as he reflects on the miscellany of daily life-movies and art, friends and family-over the course of a single year.

A compelling celebration of the power of the essay, this collection of 47 writings offers a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Montaigne as he reflects on the miscellany of daily life-movies and art, friends and family-over the course of a single year.

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 Kiarostami, the resistible 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.

By: Phillip Lopate
Imprint: New York Review Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 146mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781681377780
ISBN 10: 1681377780
Pages: 150
Publication Date: 10 October 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically; and of the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. He has edited the anthologies The Art of the Personal Essay, The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay, and The Contemporary American Essay. His most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head, To Show and to Tell, and A Mother's Tale.

Reviews for A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays

"""Lopate has long been established as an exemplar of the personal essay as well as a critic, poet, and, occasionally, fiction writer. In 2016, he took on a less formal task, producing a weekly blog for the American Scholar. The resulting collection of these posts, penned with a generally light touch, affords Lopate greater freedom of movement and a wider range of subject matter...A master of short-form discourse succeeds with highly individualized and candid observations."" —Kirkus"