Christopher Isherwood – författare

In 1929, Christopher Isherwood leaves England on a one-way ticket to Berlin.He is determined to become a permanent foreigner, to lose himself – and discover his sexuality – in the boy bars of Berlin. The next ten years will be the most memorable of Isherwood’s life. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood depicts the decadence of the city’s night scene and his route to sexual liberation. Yet something dark looms on the horizon. As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood recounts his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GORE VIDAL‘A truly masterly writer’ New York Times ‘A brilliant literary memoir’ Gore Vidal‘Isherwood at his best’ New Statesman

First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires — this was the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and “divinely decadent”Sally Bowles; plump Fraulein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Buste relieve her heart palpitations; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling to come to terms with their relationship; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.

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.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP HENSHERBerlin, the Greek Islands, London and California. 1928, 1932, 1938 and 1940. 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.

George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. This short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TOM FORD‘Lyrical and intensely moving’ Daily Telegraph‘Widely recognised as his supreme achievement . . . a work of compressed brilliance’ Guardian‘A virtuoso piece of work . . . powerful’ Sunday Time

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. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York and to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity.The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time—Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. But the diaries are most revealing about Isherwood himself—his fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide.In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin''s spaceflight, de Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in America''s inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade that more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

Candid and revealing, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood''s diaries brings together his thoughts on life, love, and death. Beginning in the period of his life when he wrote Kathleen and Frank, his first intensely personal book, Liberation: Diaries 1970–1983 intimately and wittily records Isherwood''s immersion in the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York, and London—a world peopled by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, as well as his Broadway writing career, which brought him in touch with John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion, and Armistead Maupin. With a preface by Edmund White, Liberation is a rich and engaging final memoir by one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Garbo, Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton, Gielgud, Olivier, Richard Burton and Aldous Huxley.Throughout this period, Isherwood continued to write novels and sustain his literary friendships - with E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and others. He turned to his diaries several times a week to record jokes and gossip, observations about his adopted country, philosophy and mystical insights. His devotion to his diary was a way of accounting for himself; he used it as both a discipline and a release.

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. In his first novel, Christopher Isherwood paints an intimate portrait of the battle between old and young as he explores the destruction of a son by a domineering parent.

Breaking a long silence Oliver, a young Englishman, writes to his elder brother, Patrick. Oliver, the idealistic younger brother is living in a Hindu Monastery and has decided to take his final monastic vows. Patrick, a successful, long-married publisher, newly in love with a boy in Los Angeles, decides to visit Oliver to persuade him not renounce the world.First published in 1967, A Meeting by the River exposes the complex rivalries of sibling relationships and dramatises the conflict between sexuality and spirituality.

The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. 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. With subtle wit and trademark irony, Isherwood's second novel evokes a society in flux.

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project, and Hitler’s shadow lengthens over Europe.‘A masterly novella’ Guardian‘A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence’ New Yorker

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. The Condor and the Cows is Isherwood’s unsentimental and wonderfully rich account of that journey, during which he bumped into a handful of old acquaintances on a brand-new continent.

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. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

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. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood’s contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.

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. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.

In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, capstone of a million-word masterwork, he greets advancing age with poignant humour and an unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood journeyed and changed with his century, until, by the 1980s, he was celebrated as the finest prose writer in English and the Grand Old Man of Gay Liberation. The mainstays of his mature contentment, his Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda and his long term companion, Don Bachardy, draw from him an unexpected high tide of joy and love.Gifted friends both anonymous and infamous take a turn through Isherwood's densely populated human comedy, sketched with ruthlessness and benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War and the Nixon, Carter and Reagan White Houses. Bachardy’s burgeoning career pulled Isherwood into the 1970s art scene where we meet Rauschenberg, Ruscha, and Warhol (serving fetid meat for lunch) as well as Hockney (adored) and Kitaj. 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.These are the most concrete and the most mysterious of his diaries, candidly revealing the fear of death that crowded in past Isherwood’s fame, and showing how his life-long immersion in the day-to-day lifted him, paradoxically, toward transcendence.

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; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

The aphorisms collected in this book, first published in 1953, were composed by Patanjali, a great Indian sage, over 1,500 years ago, and here translated into clear English prose. The accompanying commentary interprets the sayings for the modern world, and in doing so gives a full picture of what yoga is, what its aims are, and how it can be practised.

The aphorisms collected in this book, first published in 1953, were composed by Patanjali, a great Indian sage, over 1,500 years ago, and here translated into clear English prose. The accompanying commentary interprets the sayings for the modern world, and in doing so gives a full picture of what yoga is, what its aims are, and how it can be practised.