My Guru and His Disciple

Christopher Isherwood author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:23rd May '13

Should be back in stock very soon

My Guru and His Disciple cover

First published in 1980, Isherwood's overlooked last book is central to an understanding of his life and work.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW

In 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 A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW

In 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.

Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader. If I had to propose a candidate for canonization, Isherwood - wry, self-conscious, scrupulously honest - would get my vote -- Edmund White * New York Times *
A masterpiece of spiritual memoir * Los Angeles Times *
What emerges is a record of a religious adventure that would have delighted Kierkegaard... Isherwood rejects conventional piety - all the humdrum apparatus of worship - in favor of a direct, even jaunty appreciation of how preposterous, certainly precarious, spirituality can be today. * New York Times *
The sacred and the profane collide like never before -- Giles Foden * Conde Nast Traveller *

ISBN: 9780099561231

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 20mm

Weight: 224g

320 pages