A Day at the Beach

“A memoir of uncommon grace and self-deprecating charm. . . . Buoyant and forceful.” —Newsday

“Wolff is always a dream to read. . . . A Day at the Beach is a délice from one of America’s best memoirists.” —The Village Voice

“Sparkling. . . . Style is the hero of these essays. . . . [Wolff] has lived a rich, full life that sounds almost Victorian in its mix of adventure and stability.” —The New York Times
 
“More fun, more instructive, more heartwarming than any day at the beach I can recall. A splendid collection.” —George Plimpton

“Elegant. . . . Provide[s] an upbeat counterpoint to the troubled father-son relationship chronicled in The Duke of Deception. . . . In Geoffrey Wolff, America is blessed.” —Los Angeles Times

“Honest and touching. . . . [Wolff explores] the romance of building the clean well-lighted sentence.” —Chicago Tribune

“Exhilarating. . . . Conjures up a diversity of scenes, set in locations ranging from Istanbul to Greenwich Village to a Caribbean beach.” —Publishers Weekly

“Wolff is one of the all-time great yarn spinners, and the texture of his prose is a marvel.” —Frank Conroy

“A Day at the Beach is at once charming and deeply moving. Anyone who admired The Duke of Deception will be drawn to this compelling memoir.” —Richard Selzer

“It’s impossible to read Geoffrey Wolff’s essays without being reminded what good writing is for. The complexities, the punishments, the exuberance of having a full life are his subject. There is no parsimony here, no falseness, no evasion. There is just the deeply satisfying familiarity of Wolff’s voice. You sense the completeness of the man in the writer.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg

“A Day at the Beach sneaks up on you in several places with remarkably steady views of American values in the face of mortality. It is an absorbing book, literate, full of life and marvelous information.” —Thomas McGuane

“Wolff has ripened through the years to a generous empathy and a supple specificity that mark him as a very special talent. As a story-telling essayist, he can be bravura, gentle or informative, balancing mercy with incongruity. One reads him wishing he were in the room.” —Edward Hoagland