Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 7pm, Music Building, $15

P h i l l i p   L o p a t e
with Leonard Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of many volumes of nonfiction, including Getting Personal: Selected Writings, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, Waterfront, and, most recently, Notes on Sontag. He is also the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, as well as the author of the novels Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and, most recently, the collection of two novellas Two Marriages. David Shields has said: “In book after book, Phillip Lopate has explained and demonstrated that the basis of the essay is honesty. And yet in [Two Marriages] he shows how corrosive honesty can be, how deluded, how destructive, how rationalizing, even masochistic, particularly in the matter of love. Two Marriages is a surprising, stinging, thrilling performance.” Ann Beattie has said: “Lopate is a fantastic writer—humane, wry, and always astonishingly willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbolic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created.” The Dallas Morning News has said: “Phillip Lopate has made himself into one of our best personal essayists…he has…demonstrated his charismatic gift for self-revelation and proven that honesty is the professional essayist’s password.” Sven Birkets has said: “Phillip Lopate is one of our few essential essayists. He registers with accuracy and tact the voice of a man of deep human impulse living in a civilization on the wane. His fearlessness is tonic, his candor is straight gin.”

In addition to reading from his work, Phillip Lopate will be interviewed by his brother, Leonard Lopate.

photo of Phillip Lopate: Emma Dodge Hanson