"The Mayor of Casterbridge," by Thomas Hardy, is part of the "Barnes & Noble Classics"" "series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of "Barnes & Noble Classics": New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. "Barnes & Noble Classics "pulls together a constellation of influences-biographical, historical, and literary-to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
Thomas Hardy's first masterpiece, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past. His wife ultimately returns to offer Henchard the choice of redemption or a further descent into his ownself-destructive nature. A dark, complex story, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" brims with invention, vitality, and even wit.

Phillip Lopate, a professor at Hofstra University in New York City, is best known as an essayist ("Bachelorhood," "Against Joie De Vivre," "Portrait of My Body"). He is the editor of the anthology "Art of the Personal Essay" and has written a novel, "The Rug Merchant," and a book of poetry, "The Daily Round,"

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.

In 1977, Bennington College alumna Edith Barbour Andrews established the Ben Belitt Lectureships in gratitude to her teacher Ben Belitt and dedicated the publication of the lectures (in the form of chapbooks) to the memory of William Troy, another of her beloved teachers. The collection, published here in one volume, comprises lectures by some of the most inspiring writers and keenest critics of our time. In his introduciton to The Ordering Mirror, Phillip Lopate contrasts the anticipations and the audience/lecturer dynamic inherent in attending yearly lecture, with the experience of reading them, and the opportunity for reflection and comparison. Lopate summarizes that, "It is enough to appreciate that we are watching masters of the game of essay-writing, who, even as they comment on the masterpieces of other writers, practice their own wizardry." The volume includes: George Steiner, "The Uncommon Reader" (1978) Frank Kermode, "Divination" (1979) Harold Bloom, "To the Tally of My Soul: Whitman's Image of Voice" (1980) Denis Donoghue, "The Politics of Modern Criticism" (1981) Irving Howe, "The Making of a Critic" (1982) Richard Ellman, "The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce" (1983) Bernard Malamud, "Long Work, Short Life" (1984) Ben Belitt, "Literature and Belief: Three 'Spiritual Exercises'" (1985) Saul Bellow, "Summations" (1987) Hugh Kenner, "Magics and Spells (about curses, charms, and riddles)" (1987) Richard Rorty, "The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty" (1988) Rene Girard, "Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" (1989) Nadine Gordimer, "Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals and Politics" (1990) Seamus Heaney, "Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas" (1992) Cynthia Ozick, "What Henry James Knew" (1992)

The 40th anniversary edition of an American classic: a "minority student" pays the cost of social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation-from his past, his parents, his culture. Exquisitely written, poignant and powerful, unsettling and controversial, this both a profound study of the importance of language and a moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man. Forty years ago, readers met the extraordinary writer Richard Rodriguez through the story of his own education. He would go on to win a loyal readership with Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Brown: The Last Discovery of America, and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography. But first came Hunger of Memory, originally published by Godine in 1982. Hunger of Memory is the story of a young Mexican-American, who began school in Sacramento, California knowing just fifty words of English, yet concluded his university studies in the reading room of the British Museum. In between, he fought a dramatic struggle between his public and private self. A longtime resident of San Francisco, and an ardent opponent of easy labels and limited self-conceptions, Rodriguez describes himself as a "queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation." Resisting the easy way of following received dogmatic and conventional thought, Rodriguez has also encountered hostility for his provocative positions on issues such as affirmative action and bilingual education. But the extraordinary clarity of his iconoclastic writing-the surprising twists in his thinking, the view of public policy as it limits individual lives, and the story he tells of an American education-have made this book endure for forty years and counting. This edition includes a new afterword by the author as well as an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Whether you're hearing about Richard Rodriguez for the first time, or have read him for years, whether his life is like your own or far from it, if you care about the power of language and original thinking, you owe yourself to read Hunger of Memory.

A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism ( Our moods do not believe in each other; Money often costs too much ), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe s courtly muses and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity. But he remains one of America s least understood writers. And, by his own admission, he spawned neither school nor follower (he valued independent thought too much). Now, in this annotated selection of Emerson s writings, David Mikics instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of Emerson s essential works and the remarkable thinker who produced them.

Full of color illustrations and rich in archival photographs, this volume offers much for the specialist and general reader. In his running commentaries on Emerson s essays, addresses, and poems, Mikics illuminates contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. He quotes extensively from Emerson s "Journal" to shed light on particular passages or lines and examines Emerson the essayist, poet, itinerant lecturer, and political activist. Finally, in his Foreword, Phillip Lopate makes the case for Emerson as a spectacular truth teller a model of intellectual labor and anti-dogmatic sanity.

Anyone who values Emerson will want to own this edition. Those wishing to discover, or to reacquaint themselves with, Emerson s writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than "The Annotated Emerson."

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Called by Virginia Woolf "the prince" of essayists and praised by F. W. Dupee for a "whim of iron, cleverness amounting to genius," Max Beerbohm himself noted that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously." Nonetheless, from his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until, after World War II, when he put the pen aside, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own. Here Phillip Lopate, one of the finest essayists of our day, has selected the finest of Beerbohm's essays. Whether writing about the vogue for Russian writers, laughter and philosophy, dandies, or George Bernard Shaw, Beerbohm is as unpredictable as he is unfailingly witty and wise. As Lopate writes, "Today...it becomes all the more necessary to ponder how Beerbohm performed the delicate operation of displaying so much personality without lapsing into sticky confession."

For more than four hundred years, the personal  essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant  of all literary forms. Distinguished from the  detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational  tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward  candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay  seizes on the minutiae of daily life-vanities,  fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and  disappointment, the pleasures of solitude,  reading, taking a walk -- to offer insight into the  human condition and the great social and political  issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is  the first anthology to celebrate this fertile  genre. By presenting more than seventy-five personal  essays, including influential forerunners from  ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East,  masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the  sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest  personal essays from the last four centuries, editor  Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist,  displays the tradition of the personal essay in all  its historical grandeur, depth, and  diversity.

Reader, you have in your hands a motley collection of essays, personal and critical. The advantage of the heterogeneous essay collection by a single author is that it shows you how a particular mind moves through the world. If you are attracted to an essayist's mentality and way of speaking, ideally you can surrender happily to his or her take on various subject matters, the more diverse the better. Let us see how our author will tackle this particular memory, neurotic tic, political or social problem, book, movie, play, comic strip, rock band, without requiring an over-arching theme. If there is a consistent theme in this particular collection, it is the discovery of limitations, and learning to live with them. The recognition of one's limits, painful as it may be, can have salutary side-effects.In my case, it absolves me of the need to be both a hero and a coward, an explorer and a stay-at-home, a saint and a villain, a loyal husband and a Don Juan, a political activist and a skeptic, a spiritual mystic and a rationalist atheist, a performing athlete and a sports fan, a great if excruciatingly self-demanding literary stylist and a prolific if merely good-enough writer.

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.

Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.

Phillip Lopate's richest and most ambitious book  yet--the final volume of a trilogy that began with  Bachelorhood and Against  Joie de Vivre--Portrait of My  Body is a powerful memoir in the form of  interconnected personal essays. One of America's  foremost essayists, who helped focus attention on  the form in his acclaimed anthology The  Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate  demonstrates here just how far a writer can go in the  direction of honesty and risk  taking.



In thirteen essays, Lopate explores the  resources and limits of the self, its many disguises,  excuses, and unmaskings, with his characteristic  wry humor and insight. From the title essay, a  hilarious physical self-exam, to the haunting  portrait of his ex-colleague Donald Barthelme, to the  bittersweet account of his long-delayed surrender  to marriage, "On Leaving Bachelorhood,"  Lopate wrestles with finding the proper balance  between detachment and empathy, doubt and  conviction. In other essays, he celebrates his love of  film and city life, and reflects on his religious  identity as a Jew. A wrenchingly vivid,  unforgettable portrait of the author's eccentric,  solipsistic, aged father, a self-proclaimed failure, is  the centerpiece of a suite of essays about  father-figures and resisted mentors. The book ends with  the author's own introduction to fatherhood, as  witness to the birth of his daughter.  



A book that will engage readers with its  conversational eloquence, skeptical intelligence,  candor, and mischief, Portrait of My  Body is a captivating work of literary  nonfiction.

Anchor Books proudly launches an annual essay series. Acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate has selected the most surprising, important, and exquisite pieces published during the last twelve months. Bringing together materials from both periodicals and books, "The Anchor Essay Annual 1997" also includes essays never before published, as well as translations from abroad. The result is as rich and unique as it is cosmopolitan.
In her brilliantly frank "Revelation," Mary Gaitskill recounts the religious epiphany that changed her life. Hilton Als explores the "Negressity" of his soul in "My Pin-Up." In his dazzling "The Laying Off of Desire," Jean Baudrillard sets forth a flamboyant dissection of human sexuality. Hubert Butler ruminates on the stunted life of his handicapped grandchild in "Little K." We relive the glories and disappointments of the Borscht Belt in Vivian Gornick's evocative group portrait, "The Catskills Remembered." And we ride a rollercoaster of cultural insight in Daniel Harris's "A Psychosexual History of the Homosexual Body." A a whole, this superb collection is a heady cocktail indeed.
All of this exciting new work is placed in context with an illuminating introduction from Phillip Lopate, "the house authority on the genre and its greatest practitioner" ("Washington Times"). With generous selections from over twenty-five writers from around the world, "The Anchor Essay Annual 1997" is the first in what is sure to become a series widely anticipated and highly acclaimed, every October, for years to come.

"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. 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. 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. 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. This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.

En un esplendido apartamento de Brooklyn, el fin de semana transcurre placidamente para una pareja neoyorquina: Eleanor y Frank, dos profesionales de exito que creen haber logrado el equilibrio emocional en el que para ambos es su segundo matrimonio. Los domingos se suelen reunir con un sofisticado circulo de amistades y ese dia preparan en casa una cena en honor de un amigo, actor de moda, al que llevan tiempo sin ver. Los invitados van llegando de manera desordenada e incorporandose con naturalidad a los preparativos de la cena; la conversacion es animada, el ambiente jovial. Pero cuando los amigos se marchan y la pareja se queda a solas, las tensiones que han ido surgiendo en las ultimas horas salen a la luz amenazando la estabilidad de su relacion. Phillip Lopate, que no habia publicado libros de ficcion desde El mercader de alfombras, explora en esta novela la intimidad de una pareja, narrando con humor y ternura la compleja red de necesidades, deseos, sospechas y certidumbres en la que cristaliza toda relacion. En el 2008 Lopate publico el libro Two Marriages, compuesto por dos nouvelles, una de las cuales ahora presentamos.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive, subversive, and entertaining American authors of the last half of the twentieth century. The cinematic adaptations of Dick's fiction have generated so much interest since "Blade Runner"'s 1982 release that a comprehensive assessment of these films is necessary. "Future Imperfect" is the only book to examine the first eight cinematic adaptations of Dick's fiction in light of their literary sources. In this book, Jason P. Vest explores how filmmakers as diverse as Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Linklater have each, in their turn, expanded, extrapolated, and diverged from Dick's fiction when translating its powerful and challenging insights to the silver screen. "Future Imperfect" gauges how well the film adaptations of Dick's work have captured his unique vision of the human future and how deeply his storytelling abilities have influenced the development of science fiction movies from "Blade Runner" to the present day.

Now in its third year, this annual collection presents the most notable, influential, and surprising essays published in the last twelve months in either books or periodicals throughout the English-speaking world. Selected with consummate taste and a catholic openness to style and subject matter by famed essayist, critic, and editor, Phillip Lopate, the 1999 edition demonstrates that the form continues its renaissance as an unrivaled vehicle of intelligence and sensibility.

For this edition, Lopate has paired his tewnty-eight selections by topic, which offers suprising parallels and divergences in points of view. Andre Dubus and Tom Beller on apprentice work as a form of true experience; Richard Rorty and George Packer on the quixotic and often self-defeating character of the American left; Siri Hustvedt and Wayne Koestenbaum on the verities of erotic experience; Bliss Broyard and M. G. Stephens on their fathers; Marcus Laffey and Charles Bowden on violence, crime, and police work; Susan Sontag and Martha Nussbaum on the necessity and consolation of art--these are just some of the peerless practitioners of the essay featured in this superb collection.

All of this exciting new work is placed in context by an equally superb introductory essay by Lopate. A special feature of this 1999 edition is an appendix in which literary and intellectual notables nominate their selections of the best and most influential essays and essayists of the century. This prestigious Anchor annual is more than ever an unequaled showcase for an indispensable and ever-changing literary form.