Patricia Hampl

"Golden Prague seemed mostly gray when Patricia Hampl first went there in quest of her Czech heritage. In that bleak time, no one could have predicted the political upheaval awaiting communist Europe and the city of Kafka and Rilke. Hampl's subsequent memoir, a brilliant evocation of Czech life under socialism, attained the stature of living history and added to our understanding not only of Central Europe but also of what it means to be engaged in the struggle of a people to define and affirm themselves."--BOOK JACKET. "Reissued now, during the tenth anniversary of that astonishing upheaval known as the Velvet Revolution, A Romantic Education includes an extensive, updated afterword based on Hampl's annual return trips to Prague and the Czech countryside. Here is an introduction to what was once the unknown "other Europe" behind the Iron Curtain and to one of Europe's most bewitching cities."--BOOK JACKET.

"Patricia Hampl's meditation on the odalisque opens with her discovery of a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen behind her. Here was a poster girl for twentieth-century feminism, free and untouchable; a welcome secular version of the nuns of Hampl's girlhood. Blue Arabesque explores the allure of that lounging figure so at odds with the increasing rush of the modern era, transporting us to the Cote d'Azur and across to North Africa, from cloister to harem. We encounter writers and artists as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield, all of them magnetized, as Matisse was, by the liquid light of the south of France. Returning always to Matisse's obsessive portraits of languid women, Hampl is startled to realize that they were not mere decorative indulgences but something much more."--Book jacket.

"Virgin Time is a book that goes to the heart of one of the most profound yet least discussed issues of contemporary American life: the individual's search for faith. It is "a passionate inquiry," as Patricia Hampl puts it, "into the sources of wonder that cause a person to say, 'I believe.'"" "Hampl's book begins as a grudging quest - not to find something, but to shake the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing. In her search, she travels to the "old world" of Catholicism, in Italy and France, and inevitably her pilgrimage is peopled with other pilgrims - crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, the surging crowds of Lourdes with their candles and incurable illnesses, and the eccentric seekers that fill every charter flight. Inevitably, too, she finds the "old world" right at home, in the very past she had tried to escape. Finally, on a visit to a monastery near the Lost Coast of Northern California, she is able to settle into the real goal of her search: the silence of prayer." "Virgin Time meets head-on the challenges to spirituality raised by contemporary life and responds to them searchingly, honestly, and movingly. Patricia Hampl's new book has unforgettable resonating power."--BOOK JACKET.

"In the spring of 1985, Patricia Hampl and Steven Sorman journeyed with a group of friends and family members to the small Iowa farming community of Spillville, where Antonin Dvorak and his family spent the summer of 1893. The American Midwestern landscape, past and present, is the subject of Spillville, along with Dvorak and the music he composed there"--Back cover.

Memoir, that landscape bordered by memory and imagination, has become the signature genre of our age. In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl moves back and forth between a series of story-like recollections and essays in which she considers how she has been "enchanted or bedeviled" by autobiographical writing - her own and others'.

A short novel written in an experimental blend of play and novel. The story is a simple morality play set in a circus. When an ageing man’s young wife suspects that her husband is sterile she decides to seduce his young assistant solely to become pregnant, wanting to give her husband the child he craves. When the husband discovers the truth he must come to terms with his pride.

In an effort to discover the value of daydreaming and leisure, the author sets out on a journey that will take her to the homes of people who famously wasted time daydreaming, but were better for it, including Gregor Mendel. "The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne--the hero of this book--who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay. Hampl's own life winds through these pilgrimages, from childhood days lazing under a neighbor's beechnut tree, to a fascination with monastic life, and then to love--and the loss of that love which forms this book's silver thread of inquiry. Finally, a remembered journey down the Mississippi near home in an old cabin cruiser with her husband turns out, after all her international quests, to be the great adventure of her life. The real job of being human, Hampl finds, is getting lost in thought, something only leisure can provide. The Art of the Wasted Day is a compelling celebration of the purpose and appeal of letting go"--Book jacket.

Includes essays by Joseph Brodsky, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Hoagland, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff, among others.