The Wishing Tree: Christopher Isherwood on Mystical Religion

Christopher Isherwood

Vedanta Pr

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.

Liberation: Diaries, Vol. 3: 1970-1983

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Harper

Christopher Isherwood came to the Vedanta Society fed up with religion, in fact, he was rather angry about the whole experience, but at the Vedanta Society of Southern California under Sw. Prabhavananda, he was caught. The book is a collection of his writings on Vedanta, many of them as introduction or prologues to various books.

The Wishing Tree

Literature & Fiction

Vedanta Press & Bookshop

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. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

Vintage

A Single Man

'The best prose writer in English' - Gore Vidal. Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, "A Single Man" is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. 'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' - "Sunday Times".

LGBTQ+ Books

Vintage Classics

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.

A Single Man (Vintage Classics)

Vintage Books USA

Christopher & His Kind

Classics

Vintage Digital

Prater Violet

A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' - Edmund Wilson An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet . In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.

Contemporary

This title features with an introduction James Fenton. Subtitled "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.

Lions and Shadows

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

New Directions Books

First published in 1933, the novel portrays a series of encounters in Berlin between the narrator and the camp and mildly sinister Mr. Norris. Evoking the atmosphere in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, the novel has achieved the status of a modern classic.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains

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Books by Christopher Isherwood