A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays Lopate PhillipPaperback

A compelling celebration of the power of the essay, this collection of 47 writings offers a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Montaigne as he reflects on the miscellany of daily life--movies and art, friends and family--over the course of a single year.
The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already