Phillip Lopate

Published in 1981, Bachelorhood was Lopate's personal experiences as an unmarried man in the big city. Specifically he explores four themes of bachelor life: relationships with women and love; the observer; friendship with those both married and single; and the artist and thinking man. Entertaining, though provoking and occasionally even heartbreaking, Bachelorhood is a fantastic collection of essays.

A memoir of interconnected personal essays.

"A compelling record of one year in the life of a writer, including observations about movies, art, music, friendship, travel, and family. 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...

"A series of exploratory walks around Manhattan's shoreline tours such locales as the Battery and the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers to offer insight into the history, myths, economy, ecology, and politics surrounding the Brooklyn Bridge and other public spaces and landmarks. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

In wholly original and startling ways, the authors of this inspired volume capture New York's spirit -- on the streets and in the subways, in the shops, hotels, and "eating houses", at riots, in newspapers, on bridges and in parks, in sweat shops, and in some of its denizens' diaries. An expansive range of more than one hundred brilliant voices includes Mary McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, Henry James,...

"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best...