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The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

A lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by his landlady and her bohemian lodgers. He rooms with an English runaway and want-to-be star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles, and holidays on the Baltic coast with a repressed Englishman and his swaggering German lover.

George is heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. A professor of English in sunny, suburban California, George grieves in solitude, surrounded by easy-going, uncomprehending youth. Beneath his British restraint, waves of sorrow and anger surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. From his solitude springs defiance; he will triumph over loneliness and alienation, he will find love again, he will feel joy.

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. Classics of modern fiction, these novellas capture 1931 Berlin—charming, grotesque, and dangerous, as Hitler was ascending to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters, in particular the nightclub performer Sally Bowles, whose misadventures were popularized on stage and screen in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

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.

On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris. This chance encounter ignites a close friendship between the two Englishmen, one that draws Bradshaw into the seedier quarters of the city. Here, Norris runs a dubious import–export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. Yet there is something sinister about Norris himself. Bradshaw’s new companion is a man of contradictions: heavily in debt but extraordinarily lavish, excessively polite but sexually deviant.

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. On the other end of the line is the brilliant yet temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of a saccharine 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 family is in danger in Vienna, while his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded by his British colleagues.

Full-cast dramatisations of three insightful novels by Christopher Isherwood, plus a bonus interview Novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood is best known for The Berlin Stories of pre-Hitler Germany, which inspired the musical Cabaret. Many of his works have been adapted for stage and...

Ein melancholischer Abgesang auf eine verlorene Welt: Kosmopolitisch, libertin, glamourös und dekadent - mit fotografischer Präzision erfasst Christopher Isherwood die letzten Tage der Weimarer Republik in Berlin und zeichnet unvergessliche Porträts der Menschen, die seinen Weg kreuzen und unterschiedlicher nicht sein könnten: Zwei junge Männer, die in fataler Weise voneinander abhängen, eine vermögende jüdische Familie, die das nahende Unglück nicht wahrhaben will, und zahlreiche Mitglieder der Halbwelt, unter ihnen die hinreißend leichtsinnige Sally Bowles, die in der Literatur ihresgleichen sucht.

Jacob Ericson, a shy, enigmatic, and somewhat inept ranch hand learns that his hands possess the mysterious gift of healing: a gift he uses to cure animals and Sharon, the woman he adores. His gift is quickly exploited and the boundaries of his charm and naïveté begin to stretch. Following Sharon to Los Angeles, Jacob offers his healing powers for free at a church in Los Angeles, and then at a seedy stage show where his beloved Sharon also works.

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 to renounce the world.

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.

Arthur Norris colpisce immediatamente l'alter ego di Christopher Isherwood, il giovane William Bradshaw, che lo incontra nello scompartimento di un treno diretto in Germania. Col tempo Norris si rivelerà un avventuriero incline al misfatto e allo sperpero, un simpatizzante comunista che folleggia disinvolto nel basso ventre della Berlino dei primi anni Trenta. In pratica l'amico perfetto per William, approdato a Berlino per vivere una vacanza prolungata, lontana dalle costrizioni della famiglia. Finché, nell'inverno del 1933, il gioco inizierà a farsi troppo serio...

Un giovane uomo, alter ego dell’autore, nel 1930 si trasferisce a Berlino per insegnare inglese. Sono gli ultimi anni della Repubblica di Weimar, poco prima dell’ascesa del Nazismo e su questo sfondo si muovono una serie di personaggi sopra le righe: artisti, intellettuali, borghesi, ricchi, poveri, folli. Tra cabaret e caffè, tra case signorili e squallide pensioni, tra file per il pane e manifestazioni di piazza, tra crisi economica, Isherwood ci consegna una purissima, scabra narrazione che ci ricorda come la Storia sia sempre contemporanea.

Isherwood ci racconta una giornata nella vita di George, un professore inglese non più giovane che vive in California. Non è una giornata particolare per George: solo altre ventiquattr’ore senza Jim, il suo compagno morto in un incidente. Ventiquattr'ore fra il sospetto dei vicini, la consolante vicinanza di Charlotte, la rabbia contro i libri letti per una vita ma ormai inutili, e il desiderio di un corpo giovane appena intravisto ma che forse è già troppo tardi per toccare. Quanto basta per comporre un ritratto che non si può dimenticare.

'Sebestyen reminds us once again why he is one of the best historians writing today' ANDREW ROBERTS, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny In the years after the First World War, Berlin was - as Vladimir Nabokov described it - a place 'of dangerous glamour and worldliness, of tawdry cynicism...

Die letzten Tage der Weimarer Republik in Berlin. Die Menschen verschließen die Augen vor der drohenden Katastrophe und feiern sich um den Verstand: zwei junge Männer, die in fataler Weise voneinander abhängen, eine vermögende jüdische Familie, die das nahende Unglück nicht wahrhaben will sowie zahlreiche Mitglieder der Halbwelt. Mitten unter ihnen träumt die hinreißend leichtsinnige Nachtclubsängerin Sally Bowles von der großen Karriere. Im Hintergrund der Szenerie marschieren bereits die Nazis auf.

"At once an unflinchingly beautiful novel about queer desire, summer days, and casual sex that is also an elegy to friendship, grief, and lovers lost. Startlingly brave and brilliantly told, I devoured each page not sure what to expect next. The Living Realm belongs in the firmament of great gay...

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, a celebrated novelist and a talented painter, were openly gay in conservative 1950s Hollywood. In private, they called themselves The Animals. Simon Callow and Alan Cumming read their love letters; Katherine Bucknell reveals secrets they kept even from their friends, a galaxy of star writers, artists, stage players and movie makers in L.A., London, and New York. The series is capped by a play the lovers wrote together, A Meeting by the River, starring Dominic West, Kyle Soller and Penelope Wilton, and directed by Anthony Page. Hosted on Acast. See ...

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER...