Antonin Dvorak’s summer 1893 stay in Spillville, Iowa is the point of departure for this collaboration between Ms. Hampl and artist Steven Sorman. “Ms. Hampl’s prose is enchanting; Mr. Sorman’s art is elegant.” The New Yorker “Ms. Hampl succeeds wonderfully……. Continue Reading →
Newsday’s Favorite Books 2007 Minnesota Book Award Winner Midwest Booksellers’ Association Choice Award Honor Book “The result is electric and alive, containing a fire her mother would surely recognize and a beauty her father would approve . . . . …. Continue Reading →
This meditation on the odalisque figure in Western art opens with Patricia Hampl’s discovery, as a young woman, of a Matisse painting in the Chicago Art Institute: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen… Continue Reading →
In this timely collection, Ms. Hampl “weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she considers the habit of autobiographical writing that enchants and bedevils her. Hampl reflects on her family’s response to… Continue Reading →
This memoir, described by Doris Grumbach as “unusually elegant and meditative,” is once more available with an updated “Afterword” by the author. Golden Prague seemed mostly gray when Ms. Hampl first went there during the dark days of the Cold… Continue Reading →
Eager to shake off the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing, Patricia Hampl seeks the “old world” of Catholicism. On her pilgrimage to Saint Francis’s Assisi, she meets other seekers–crotchety English agnostics, American friars and nuns, and the ardent souls… Continue Reading →
In her second collection of poems, Patricia Hampl addresses the classical themes of beauty and love, loss and memory, in a series of shorter poems and then in the long title poem. Set in a small, tumbledown cabin on the… Continue Reading →
In her first book (a collection of poems), Patricia Hampl establishes the themes and preoccupations that would come to define her work in poetry and prose in the next decades: her Minnesota upbringing, her Czech and Catholic heritage, love and… Continue Reading →
Balancing precariously between history and literature, memoir writers have finally found their place on the bookshelf. But increased notoriety brings intense scrutiny: memoirists are expected to create a narrative worthy of fiction while also staying true to the facts. Historians,… Continue Reading →
This anthology of sacred poetry from the three great monotheistic religions of the West–Christianity, Judaism, Islam-presents luminous offerings by such disparate voices as Francis of Assisi, Yehuda Amichai, William Blake, Rumi, Louise Erdrich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maria Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath,… Continue Reading →
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