A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays

by Phillip Lopate

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 thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, the resistible rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2023

About the author

Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Reviews

[Mayra Kalaora · Rating 4 out of 5]

that was enjoyable. a man on the train with dubious levels of sanity and english language skills was staring over my shoulder as i read it and thanked me after for letting him read it (not that he had asked me for permission) . he said he enjoyed it very much too

[Michael Reilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a disappointment. Lopate is a wonderful essayist. I have enjoyed his previous collections. He also edited three excellent anthologies that tell the history of American essays.

In May of 2016 he agreed to do a weekly blog for the American Scholar magazine. He agreed to write 400 to 1000 words per week, but he ended with over 1000 words most week. This is a collection of the posts with some re-editing.

Lopate covers a large territory. Personal, there is a blog on friends he has lost over the years, on marrying a widow, and on his father-in-law. Political, he was blogging during the campaign and election of Donald Trump. He is a New York liberal who is horrified by the development. Literary, he has been on a British woman novelist kick, including Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch and he has a piece on the death of Robert Silvers, the longtime editor of the New York Review of Books. Travel, we get pieces from his trips to China and India.

The problem is that most of the pieces read like blog entries. They are relatively short. They feel like they are written on a deadline. There are few clever turns of phrase or sentences that bring you up short. The ideas don't seem to have room to breathe.

I think that Lopate the blogger was a noble failure.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps Lopate isn't the best blogger ever. Included here are some fine essays on urban density, montainge, and scholarship. Much seems written on deadline though. I've really loved much of his other essay collections and anthologies.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Phillip Lopate is a superb writer of personal essays. This book was touted as the most personal of his essays in the shortened form of blog posts. As another reviewer commented, Lopate is no blogger. With just a couple of exceptions, these ‘mini-essays’ either failed to hold my interest or they were so personal that there was no universality to them.

[lol licious · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book from the remainders section, despite heeding the warnings, because I have been thinking about blogs as a medium, and also because I was seeking a quick summer pleasure read.

Reading someone else's journalistic writing and not my own did uncover new insights about the form. I was transported back to senior year English, where our teacher made us meet a weekly quota of journal entries. I scoured for topics, and arrived at those interesting enough to be verbalized, though not important enough to warrant careful articulation via the essay.

Lopate's short pieces here share a similar level of import (or lack thereof). I rolled my eyes often at their mundanity and crudeness. The simplicity of topics, themes, analysis stripped the writer down to his barest. In that bareness, I felt I was truly getting to know a person. But also that this person could be grating, insufferable, and not the brightest. It was hard to sit through his reductive rants on politics. These politics stem from a certain white bourgeois academic class position and produce an unthinking rejection of all that pushed the envelope. Perhaps I would have felt more warmly if these rants were more well written. But admittedly, I had to force myself to finish some sections.

Anyway, I still came away with an appreciation for some kind of ethos in living. I value reflection and share with Lopate the tendency to bestow weight (perhaps more than warranted) on simple occurrences. When he speaks of others and their characters, surgically extracts nuance from interpersonal relations, and expresses his appreciation of film and literature, I strive to imitate. If the cruder blog form cultivates greater observation and an aesthetic orientation toward one's life, then some mediocrity should be permitted. The insertion of more polished essays here creates jarring tonal shifts, but demonstrates that Lopate can actually write well despite the blogs' lack of refinement. If the blog precedes such projects more perfected, then perhaps it is a necessary part of a heuristic journey in thinking and understanding one's life.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Lopate was one of my favorite Jewish writers when I was younger, and I saw him speak at the University of Texas in Austin quite a while ago. Phillip Lopate is been the editor and writer of many collections of essays including The Art of the Personal Essay. This book is a collection of blogs that he wrote, but they tend to run into the essay form more than a blog. For example, "The Paradox of Urban Density" is very well written, but it's not a blog. Lopate is more of a writer's writer, and he can quote Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire back to back. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Honestly I did not finish this book, but I am trying to allow myself the chance to not finish a book if I do not like it, rather than forcing myself to read something I do not like - for the sake of finishing, but then hating reading in the process.

There was nothing particularly bad about these blog posts, I just did not find them particularly captivating, and they were sometimes self-indulgent - with things framed at revelations that are just common knowledge to people who... think?

Sorry

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like reading someone's blog... which was the point so... success?

The essays are consistent in the feeling of someone writing what they were thinking on any given day and can work as conversation starters. It wasn't until the very last essay about what it means to "experience" something where the work as a whole finally came together. And if there was a thread that connected all the works, or essays or blogs in general, it would be the things we experience and how we experience them.

[Peter Monaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Phillip Lopate as he represents so much of what I enjoy about writing and about reading. Here he publishes writings he took on during the year of 2016. It is impossible not to see his brilliance and love of literature, cinema and art in these samples, but also somewhat depressing as he is caught up in the 2016 election and like so many others in academia horrified by what we are becoming.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am glad I read this book. It wasn’t my favorite of his books, but I liked it. He has thoughtful pieces on a life well lived, and on growing older. These are, as he mentions at the beginning, more blog pieces than essays. They are thoughtful and funny and interesting and sometimes I would say, a bit politically incorrect (and exulting in that I think) - but always pretty honest.

[Prakash Loungani · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good effort.

[Ron Antonucci · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf

[Melody Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peak amusement and wit