**“A sharp and unconventional book — a swirl of memoir, travelogue and biography of some of history's champion day-dreamers.” —Maureen Corrigan, "Fresh Air"A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream**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...

These meditations inspired by a Matisse painting are "a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds." — The New York Times Book ReviewNamed a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction of the YearJust out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl,...

This New York Times Notable memoir of a middle-class, middle-America family is a "beautiful bouquet of a book" ( Entertainment Weekly).They say "a daughter is a daughter all her life," and no statement could be truer for Patricia Hampl. Born to a Czech father—an artistic florist—and a wary Irish mother, Hampl experienced a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, that couldn't have been more normal, the perfect example of a twentieth century middle-class, middle-A...

The Fall 2012 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Patricia Hampl. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.Award-winning memoirist and author Patricia Hampl (The Florist's Daughter, I Could Tell You Stories) compiles this all-essay issue of Ploughshares. Showcasing the diversity and range of nonfiction in English, the issue contains family memoir (“My Mother’...

A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydreamThe 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-gen...

A probing and poetic examination of language, food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life through the eyes of an American who moved to Parma with her husband and family.In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved permanently with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a sophisticated city in northern Italy, where he became a professor of biology. Her search for rootedness in the city that was to be her home introduced her to complexit...

In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating gray area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts. and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story—while also telling us true....