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Rating: 
Summary: Best Anthology on the Market for Personal Essays
Review: A book that has travelled with me for years and well worth all the space in my limited luggage space. I would definitely take this book to a desert island and it would be a book that I would grab off its shelf if my house was on fire.Time has made me appreciate the voices contained within its cover greatly.
Rating:
Summary: On The Intro
Review: Collectors love sets.
Lopate's Introduction to this volume fills out a set for me.
I want to write--essays. Finally have the instructions in hand.
The first piece of the set was Lamott's "Bird By Bird."
How to write when you're not in the mood, bored, scared, etc.
Now along comes 31* pages of Phillip's thoughts on the personal
essay. It's about as close as I can imagine to a semester or
two on-Who's written what, how they did it, and why.
I'll gnaw my way through the collected essays in time, and I'm
sure, with delight. But not before a few re-readings of this
lucid and concise instruction.
Lee
*[approximate; So who's that good at Roman numerals?]
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Anthology!!!
Review: Laurie Stone, the essayist and creative writing teacher, recommended this book to me as the most essential volume on the personal essay. I could not agree more. The editor, Philip Lopate, is one of the most well-respected authors of the personal essay and he has compiled this anthology of pieces from the classical era to the present. The book works well for readers and writers alike. Lopate, in his lengthy introduction, gives an overview of the personal essay, and instructions on how to use this book as a learning tool. It is divided into several sections, beginning with the essay's forerunners in the classical period. Michel De Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, gets his own section. Personally, I did not find it useful to read the book cover-to-cover - I read it in reverse. I started out with the most recent, contemporary essays - those most accessible to me - and went backwards in order to see the devolution of the essay, as it were.
The essay is fast becoming one of my favorite forms - it is short, funny, and insightful. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Compilation
Review: The book opens with a terrific overview of the personal essay. Not only does it discuss the place of creative nonfiction in the writing spectrum but it gets to the heart of the personal essay -how we express the human experience. Lopate walks us, the average reader, through the choosing and the parceling of these kinds of works and by the end we are prepared for the well laid journey ahead. The voices are so varied - from George Orwell's beautifully written essay on life in a British boarding school to James Baldwin's piece on his father's death and life as a Black man in America. We feel with each author, cry with them and share in their triumphs. Though the styles are quite different from one author to the next, the common thread is each person's love of writing, their adept manipulation of language, and the most important element of the essay - their honesty in each line. This is an excellent choice for those are learning the art of creative nonfiction or for those more seasoned readers or writers who truly want a satisfying read.
Rating:
Summary: THE Personal Essay Anthology
Review: There are a lot of really poor essay anthologies on the market. This is not one of them. Lopate himself is an accomplished writer, but he does his readers the great favor of including a broad range of authors, temporally and experientially. Many anthologies skip the masters (Montaigne, Orwell, Johnson) in favor of more modern--and less talented--authors. If you are looking for a single anthology of essays this is the one. It covers the entire genre like no other. And it is comparitively cheap too.
Rating:
Summary: THE Personal Essay Anthology
Review: There are a lot of really poor essay anthologies on the market. This is not one of them. Lopate himself is an accomplished writer, but he does his readers the great favor of including a broad range of authors, temporally and experientially. Many anthologies skip the masters (Montaigne, Orwell, Johnson) in favor of more modern--and less talented--authors. If you are looking for a single anthology of essays this is the one. It covers the entire genre like no other. And it is comparitively cheap too.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing tool!
Review: This has been a great reference into the insight of the personal essay. The introduction is about thirty pages long with rich detail of everything you ever needed to know about the "personal essay". Lopate delves into his selection, rationale and arrangement of this book. Everything you ever needed to know about the essay is here! The collection consist of seventy-five essays, spanning over 400 years. The first section is called the forerunners, these are the earliest dating from 1600's, included: Seneca, Plutarch, Kenko, Shonagon, Hsiu, Michel De Montaigne. Then, the rise of the English essay: Abraham Cowley, Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, etc. It is categorized for easy identification of types, style and forms of essays. Excellent collection and reference!...MzRizz
Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing tool!
Review: This has been a great reference into the insight of the personal essay. The introduction is about thirty pages long with rich detail of everything you ever needed to know about the "personal essay". Lopate delves into his selection, rationale and arrangement of this book. Everything you ever needed to know about the essay is here! The collection consist of seventy-five essays, spanning over 400 years. The first section is called the forerunners, these are the earliest dating from 1600's, included: Seneca, Plutarch, Kenko, Shonagon, Hsiu, Michel De Montaigne. Then, the rise of the English essay: Abraham Cowley, Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, etc. It is categorized for easy identification of types, style and forms of essays. Excellent collection and reference!...MzRizz
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