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.

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

Time has made me appreciate the voices contained within its cover greatly.

But "Chekhov for Children" is something quite different. The best single essay I have ever read (actually I have read it at least 5 times), it captures (and moves) me every time. If you work with kids, you need to read it. If you wonder if literature if important, you need to read it. If you like neither kids nor literature, you should still read it. Simply extraordinary.

This book caught my eye with its luminous cover picture and title, invited my scorn ( and derisive laughter ) with chapter headings like "A Taste For Naruse" and "The World According to Makavejev." Not that I consider those directors necessarily rarefied or beneath consideration, mind you, but it's hard to ignore the exclusionary tactics at work here. Even Lopate admits, in the Naruse essay, that the Japanese director's films have only been screened for a few festival vampires... in New York circa 1984. How many people are there, outside of Lopate's wine-tasting compadres, who could possibly relate to this?

Needless to say, I broke down and bought Totally, Tenderly, Tragically anyway. Any author who has the good taste to put Anna Karina on the cover of his book, so the reasoning went, deserves my money. As it turns out, that's not Anna Karina on the cover -- it's an Italian mamacita from an untraceable Antonioni film -- but that was to be the rudest shock I suffered. Otherwise, these essays were always enlightening, often surprising, and occasionally even revelatory.

The two best pieces in the book are "Anticipation of 'La Notte'" and "Fassbinder's 'Despair'." I turned the pages expecting parched, scholarly analysis, and instead was treated to very entertaining, often embarrassingly personal anecdotes. If you've ever craved dirt on Phillip Lopate, this book is manna from heaven.

In the first, a memoir of sorts in which "La Notte" serves basically the same function as the Groucho Marx movies in "Hannah and Her Sisters" -- a celluloid reminder that life is worth living -- Lopate spills the beans about not only his youthful virginity, but his resultant suicide attempt. Lest this sound too depressing, I hasten to add that Lopate is much older now, feels no pity for himself or his younger incarnations, and keeps things entirely unoppressive. But it's startling to see how time doesn't change human nature, and that virginity, pallor, and monkish solitude are the necessary components of film buffery, in 1999 no less than in 1961.

"Fassbinder's 'Despair'" has even less to do with the film in its title, instead choosing to recount a date Lopate had in the late 70's with a haughty German girl ( is there any other kind? ) Lopate's hopeless attempts to seduce the ice princess, who just wants to nurse her toothache, are thrown into sharp relief by the hovering figure of Fassbinder himself, a "greasy wild boar" who lived life to the fullest. He represents cinema; Lopate, mundane reality.

Movies are where we go to see high drama unfold in a safe, contained setting. But they're also an everpresent backdrop against which our own tiny lives play out, dwarfed by the looming figures on the screen. I can pay Lopate no higher compliment than to say he is equally skilled at evoking the transcendence of great cinema, and the quiet desperation of day-to-day life.

Yet, I must say, I admired Howells' novel very much. It is not for those who require action, sex, or dramatic events. Rather, it is a slice of life of the period, of the place, of family life and social repartee that may be unequalled. Though Howells claimed to be a "realist" and he is often spoken of, it seems, as one of such a school in American literature, the novel oscillates between extremely vivid descriptions of all varieties of life in New York, humanist philosophizing, and mild melodrama, thus, I would not class it as a truly realist novel in the same sense as say, "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Howells had the American optimism, the reluctance to dwell on the darker sides of human nature. This novel may draw accusations, then, of naivete. I think that would be short-sighted. Henry James and Faulkner might be deeper psychologically and Hemingway more sculpted, but Howells sometimes puts his finger right on the very essence of American ways of thinking and on American character. Some sections, like for instance the long passage on looking for an apartment in New York-over thirty pages---simply radiate genius. The natural gas millionaire and his shrewish daughter; the gung-ho, go-getter manager of the magazine; the dreamy, but selfish artists, the Southern belle---all these may be almost stock characters in 20th century American letters, but can never have been better summarized than here. Two statements made by Basil March, a literary editor married into an old Boston family, sum up the feel of A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, a novel that takes great cognizance of the potential for change in people (always an optimist's point of view). First, he says, "There's the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that." And lastly, he says "I don't know what it all means, but I believe it means good." Howells was no doubt a sterling man and this, perhaps his best novel, reflects that more than anything else.

Every morning, while drinking my coffee, I read a few of these essays, poems and stories. I love this island and city and I love reading about it.

Truly a delight for any New Yorker or New York lover.