East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan’s waterfront are both celebrated and secret–hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city’s soul.
A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville’s and Whitman’s day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today’s developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers....

Bringing together many great reflections on the human condition and the peculiarities of daily life, a unique collection of more than seventy-five essays ranges from classical predecessors of the genre up to today's finest writers. Reprint. NYT. ...

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.

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Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads

Celebrated essayist Phillip Lopate proves himself a master of the short novel form in this inspired pairing of novellas portraying two less-than-perfect unions.The Stoic’s Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Well-off, idle Gordon, a lifelong student of philosophy who has always had “a stunted capacity for happiness,” first meets the enchanting Rita when she comes to his home as a nurse’s aid sent to care for his dying mother. The attraction is instant and a marriage proposal ensues. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he’s adopted as his “substitute religion.” When Rita’s cousin from the Philippines arrives one Christmas, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon’s stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test.

Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends.It is Saturday morning, and Frank and Eleanor are planning the dinner they will host to celebrate the visit of a famous actor friend. These preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank’s son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.

Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit....

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Hidden pockets of wilderness still exist within the urban environs of New York City, and in Legacy Joel Meyerowitz invites us to discover them. This beautiful body of work is the result of a unique commission Meyerowitz received from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to document the city's parks. During the course of this project, Meyerowitz honed in on the 8,700 acres within the five boroughs of New York City that still exist in their original pristine state, as well as areas within parks that have been left to revert to wilderness. In creating this work, Meyerowitz has drawn on his own childhood memories of a New York that included "green space--open and wild, alive with rabbits, migratory birds, snakes, frogs and the occasional skunk--[that] gave me my first sense of the natural world, its temperament and its seasons, its unpredictability and its mystery." Through this rich compendium of images of parks, shorelines and forests, Meyerowitz's magnificent project transports the viewer into the heart of a lush wilderness, while contextualizing these nooks of nature as an inextricable part of city life today.
Joel Meyerowitz (born in New York, 1938) is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He is a two-time Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of both NEA and NEH awards, as well as a recipient of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. He has published over 15 books, including Cape Light (1978) and Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive (2006). He lives in New York....

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan’s waterfront are both celebrated and secret–hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city’s soul.
A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville’s and Whitman’s day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today’s developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers....