Bøker av Christopher Isherwood

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation.

"I make myself remember. I am afraid of forgetting. I will have to forget if Iwant to go on living."California, 1962. College professor George is grieving the death of his long-termpartner Jim. As a middle-aged gay Englishman living in the Los Angelessuburbs, he is an outsider in every way. Haunted by his past and unable tomove forward, we follow him on one very ordinary day. But for George, this isgoing to be a day like no other...A Single Man features in the Guardian's 100 Best Novels Written in English,where it is described as 'a work of compressed brilliance.' Known to manythrough Tom Ford's film, Christopher Isherwood's masterpiece is now givena wry and compassionate retelling in Simon Reade's new adaptation for thestage.Powerful and sexy, A Single Man is a darkly amusing study of grief, love andloneliness from the celebrated writer of Goodbye to Berlin, the inspiration forCabaret.

My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at MGM, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.

Best known for The Berlin Stories-the inspiration for the Tony and Academy Award-winning musical Cabaret-Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement. Where Joy Resides is the perfect introduction to the author's essential writings.This collection presents two complete novels, Prater Violet and A Single Man; episodes from three other novels, Goodbye to Berlin, Down There on a Visit, and Lions and Shadows; along with excerpts from Isherwood's nonfiction works, Exhumations, Kathleen and Frank, and My Guru and His Disciple.

An indispensable memoir by one of the most prominent writers of his generationOriginally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life-from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.

In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, the celebrated writer greets advancing age with poignant humor and an unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood deepens his study of Hinduism, writes his final books, and immerses himself in the vibrant creative scenes of the 1970s. With his long-term companion, Don Bachardy, Isherwood delves into the art worlds of Los Angeles, New York, and London, where he meets Rauschenberg, Ruscha, Warhol, and Hockney. Collaborating with Bachardy on scripts for Broadway and Hollywood, he encounters John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, David Bowie, Jon Voight, Armistead Maupin, Elton John, and Joan Didion. This volume is a densely populated human comedy, sketched with both ruthlessness and benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan White Houses. The final installment of Isherwood's masterwork reveals a man candidly fearful of his approaching death, and yet engaged in the vitality and energy of daily life.

Bremen, 1928. The Greek Islands, 1932. London, 1938. California, 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators all named Christopher Isherwood. Here are the postcards home from a spiritual tourist looking for a new mode of life as well as a new place to live while Europe, and then the world, moves relentlessly toward war. Which of the guides he encounters can lead him to a better future? The businessman, the utopian, the guru, the geisha?Published in 1962, Down There on a Visit is based on material from a proposed epic that would also have incorporated The Berlin Stories. It is now widely regarded as the most accomplished of Isherwood's novels.

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents - their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father's death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOWIn 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYERIn September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina.

Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' - Edmund WilsonAn impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry.

The First World War is over. Tall, bony and awkward he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father's roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin.

The scene is 1920s Kensington and Philip and Joan are testing the very limits of politeness and restraint as they fight to expunge the oppression of their mother - by whatever means necessary.

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution.

At a party in the Hollywood Hills, Stephen Monk finds his wife in the arms of another man. Betrayed and furious, he packs his belongings and returns to the home he was born in. But most of all, the memory of his lost love, Elizabeth Rydal, haunts him. Can he forgive his wife, and most importantly, himself?

Breaking a long silence Oliver, a young Englishman, writes to his elder brother, Patrick.

Four portraits, four settings, four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood'. Often regarded as the best of his novels, Down There on a Visit tells the vivid stories of Isherwood's life that, together with The Berlin Novels, were to have comprised his great unfinished epic novel.

Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine's Day 1953. Defying the conventions, the two men began living as an openly gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood. This book tells their story.

This text contains accounts of the author's conversion to hindu, his pacifism during World War II, his time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and his friendships with the likes of Garbo, Chaplin, Brecht, Huxley, Stravinsky, Geilgud, Olivier and Burton.

In this brilliantly perceptive novel, a middle aged professor living in California is alienated from his students by differences in age and nationality, and from the rest of society by his homosexuality. Isherwood explores the depths of the human soul and its ability to triumph over loneliness, alienation and loss.

Frpm Hollywood and the worlds of music and letters enter John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion and Armistead Maupin.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTONSubtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London's Bohemia.

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

Christopher Isherwood gives fascinating insight into pre-war Berlin. MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINSThe first of Christopher Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels, this portrays the encounter and growing friendship between young William Bradshaw and the urbane and mildly sinister Mr Norris.