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My Guru and His Disciple Christopher Isherwood |
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The author's fascinating account of his thirty-year spiritual quest. "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, script-writing conferences at M-G-M, and intellectual sparring sessions with Bertolt Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center and a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety. Seldom has a single man been endowed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline. . . . In these pages, Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader." —Edmund White, New York Times Book Review "This book is a humbling tribute to someone who revealed to Isherwood inner grounds for spiritual awareness." —Alan Hollinghurst, New Statesman A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is the author of Christopher and His Kind, The Condor and the Cows, Down There on a Visit, Kathleen and Christopher, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening. A selection of his finest writing is collected in Where Joy Resides. 352 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 2001 |
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$18.95 Paper