Phillip Lopate is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Waterfront. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
eBook
$11.99
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ISBN-13:
9781451696332
- Publisher: Free Press
- Publication date: 02/12/2013
- Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 240
- File size: 2 MB
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Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” (Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.
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If Philip Lopate's anthology The Art of the Personal Essay was the "show," this perfect shelf-mate is the "tell." In this long-promised book, Lopate expostulates on the craft of writing literary nonfiction. This deceptively simple genre actually requires artful maneuvering: Even inserting yourself as a character in an essay without usurping your subject is seldom achieved as easily as practitioners first imagine. To Show and To Tell qualifies as a navigation guide for writers and readers who wonder how great things get done. A trade paperback and NOOK Book original.
Library Journal
Lopate (director, graduate nonfiction program, Columbia Univ.; The Art of the Personal Essay) offers here another title in what seems to be a whirlwind of recent publishing on creative nonfiction. His discussions and opinions primarily concern the personal essay as representative of the wider genre of literary nonfiction. Lopate is particularly successful in probing the psychological aspects of such factual, intimate writing. His advice is as ruminative and open-ended as the writing style he seeks to draw out of his students, a more philosophical and thought-provoking take on the craft of literary nonfiction than can be found in most of the other choices on this subject. The first part, "The Craft of Personal Narrative," contains the bulk of the text. Section two, "Studies of Practitioners," covers Lopate's favorite essayists, including Charles Lamb, Edward Hoagland, and James Baldwin. VERDICT Writers and teachers of the personal essay will certainly want this title. Others with a broader interest in literary nonfiction may opt for works presenting more of an overview, such as Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction or Lee Gutkind's Creative Nonfiction: How To Live It and Write It. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/12.]—Stacey Rae Brownlie, Harrisburg Area Comm. Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA