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Pagan Light : Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri by Jamie James (2019, Hardcover)

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About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux

ISBN-100374142769

ISBN-139780374142766

eBay Product ID (ePID)20038671033

Product Key Features

Book TitlePagan Light : Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri

Number of Pages336 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2019

TopicEurope / Italy, Literary, Artists, Architects, Photographers

IllustratorYes

GenreTravel, Biography & Autobiography, History

AuthorJamie James

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.2 in

Item Weight16.4 Oz

Item Length8.6 in

Item Width5.7 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2018-033300

Dewey Edition23

Reviews"Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus "[A] beguiling study . . . [James] offers colorful historical anecdotes that feature wild parties, ritual nudity, and occasional gunplay, as well as a travelogue of the modern-day island. The result is a sensitive, wryly comic, engrossing history about creative eccentrics and erotic outlaws seeking a physical and spiritual home." -- Publishers Weekly " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man "No one writes better than Jamie James about the intersection of history, art, literature, and place, especially when the place in question is a haven for nonconformists. After reading this ravishing book, I wasn't sure whether to head to Capri without delay or to decide a visit would be redundant, because James had already taken me there." --Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter "At last: a literary biography of the island built on literature. Since Tiberius moved there from Rome in AD 26, Capri has been a symbol of freedom, a sexual utopia, a rock of exiles, and a "laboratory of the avant-garde." Marinetti's Futurist Island was D. H. Lawrence's "cat-Cranford," and Jamie James--Capri's genius loci--describes the four miles of rock as a Mediterranean Las Vegas where rules do not apply. In this eloquent tribute to her muse, James resurrects the spirit, and the spirits, of Capri: Homer, Norman Douglas, Romaine Brooks, Axel Munthe, Compton Mackenzie, Gorky, Neruda, and, most memorably for me, the life and work of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. James shows, for the first time, how Capri's literary community created a genre of its own in a mise-en-abyme of fictional biographies and biographical fictions. Pagan Light is no swan's song, but rather the Siren's final call." --Frances Wilson, author of Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey , finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, "Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus "[A] beguiling study . . . [James] offers colorful historical anecdotes that feature wild parties, ritual nudity, and occasional gunplay, as well as a travelogue of the modern-day island. The result is a sensitive, wryly comic, engrossing history about creative eccentrics and erotic outlaws seeking a physical and spiritual home." -- Publishers Weekly, "A languorous, tipsy walking tour of a locale laden with history . . . [James] proves a most entertaining guide . . . A pleasure." -- Alexander C. Kafka, The Washington Post "Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus "[A] beguiling study . . . [James] offers colorful historical anecdotes that feature wild parties, ritual nudity, and occasional gunplay, as well as a travelogue of the modern-day island. The result is a sensitive, wryly comic, engrossing history about creative eccentrics and erotic outlaws seeking a physical and spiritual home." -- Publishers Weekly " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man "No one writes better than Jamie James about the intersection of history, art, literature, and place, especially when the place in question is a haven for nonconformists. After reading this ravishing book, I wasn't sure whether to head to Capri without delay or to decide a visit would be redundant, because James had already taken me there." --Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter "At last: a literary biography of the island built on literature. Since Tiberius moved there from Rome in AD 26, Capri has been a symbol of freedom, a sexual utopia, a rock of exiles, and a "laboratory of the avant-garde." Marinetti's Futurist Island was D. H. Lawrence's "cat-Cranford," and Jamie James--Capri's genius loci--describes the four miles of rock as a Mediterranean Las Vegas where rules do not apply. In this eloquent tribute to her muse, James resurrects the spirit, and the spirits, of Capri: Homer, Norman Douglas, Romaine Brooks, Axel Munthe, Compton Mackenzie, Gorky, Neruda, and, most memorably for me, the life and work of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. James shows, for the first time, how Capri's literary community created a genre of its own in a mise-en-abyme of fictional biographies and biographical fictions. Pagan Light is no swan's song, but rather the Siren's final call." --Frances Wilson, author of Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey , finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, "A splendid and nuanced collective biography." -- The New York Times Book Review " Pagan Light is a sequence of braided long-form profiles, full of bright digressions, horrors and lives that dead end . . . James deserves a lot of credit for giving attention to important artists who, in many cases, have not been sufficiently examined by critics . . . [A] roguish, diverting book." -- David Mason, The Wall Street Journal "A languorous, tipsy walking tour of a locale laden with history . . . [James] proves a most entertaining guide . . . A pleasure." -- Alexander C. Kafka, The Washington Post "Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus "[A] beguiling study . . . [James] offers colorful historical anecdotes that feature wild parties, ritual nudity, and occasional gunplay, as well as a travelogue of the modern-day island. The result is a sensitive, wryly comic, engrossing history about creative eccentrics and erotic outlaws seeking a physical and spiritual home." -- Publishers Weekly " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man "No one writes better than Jamie James about the intersection of history, art, literature, and place, especially when the place in question is a haven for nonconformists. After reading this ravishing book, I wasn't sure whether to head to Capri without delay or to decide a visit would be redundant, because James had already taken me there." --Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter "At last: a literary biography of the island built on literature. Since Tiberius moved there from Rome in AD 26, Capri has been a symbol of freedom, a sexual utopia, a rock of exiles, and a "laboratory of the avant-garde." Marinetti's Futurist Island was D. H. Lawrence's "cat-Cranford," and Jamie James--Capri's genius loci--describes the four miles of rock as a Mediterranean Las Vegas where rules do not apply. In this eloquent tribute to her muse, James resurrects the spirit, and the spirits, of Capri: Homer, Norman Douglas, Romaine Brooks, Axel Munthe, Compton Mackenzie, Gorky, Neruda, and, most memorably for me, the life and work of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. James shows, for the first time, how Capri's literary community created a genre of its own in a mise-en-abyme of fictional biographies and biographical fictions. Pagan Light is no swan's song, but rather the Siren's final call." --Frances Wilson, author of Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey , finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, " Pagan Light is a sequence of braided long-form profiles, full of bright digressions, horrors and lives that dead end . . . James deserves a lot of credit for giving attention to important artists who, in many cases, have not been sufficiently examined by critics . . . [A] roguish, diverting book." -- David Mason, The Wall Street Journal "A languorous, tipsy walking tour of a locale laden with history . . . [James] proves a most entertaining guide . . . A pleasure." -- Alexander C. Kafka, The Washington Post "Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus "[A] beguiling study . . . [James] offers colorful historical anecdotes that feature wild parties, ritual nudity, and occasional gunplay, as well as a travelogue of the modern-day island. The result is a sensitive, wryly comic, engrossing history about creative eccentrics and erotic outlaws seeking a physical and spiritual home." -- Publishers Weekly " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man "No one writes better than Jamie James about the intersection of history, art, literature, and place, especially when the place in question is a haven for nonconformists. After reading this ravishing book, I wasn't sure whether to head to Capri without delay or to decide a visit would be redundant, because James had already taken me there." --Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter "At last: a literary biography of the island built on literature. Since Tiberius moved there from Rome in AD 26, Capri has been a symbol of freedom, a sexual utopia, a rock of exiles, and a "laboratory of the avant-garde." Marinetti's Futurist Island was D. H. Lawrence's "cat-Cranford," and Jamie James--Capri's genius loci--describes the four miles of rock as a Mediterranean Las Vegas where rules do not apply. In this eloquent tribute to her muse, James resurrects the spirit, and the spirits, of Capri: Homer, Norman Douglas, Romaine Brooks, Axel Munthe, Compton Mackenzie, Gorky, Neruda, and, most memorably for me, the life and work of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. James shows, for the first time, how Capri's literary community created a genre of its own in a mise-en-abyme of fictional biographies and biographical fictions. Pagan Light is no swan's song, but rather the Siren's final call." --Frances Wilson, author of Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey , finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, "Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom . . . A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history." -- Kirkus, Praise for The Glamour of Strangeness "Esoterically learned and always entertaining . . . [Jamie James] may be a blue-chip professional writer (and one with a subtle sense of language and a very good idea of where his reader is), but there's no question that his new book is the work of an amateur in the strictest, most laudable sense: the one who acts, in this case writes, out of love . . . Quite a few readers will, I'm sure, pick up James's book to nourish dreams of escaping the malfunctioning contraption of the homeland." -Joseph O'Neill, The New York Times Book Review

Dewey Decimal945/.73

SynopsisA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man A rich, intimate embrace of Capri, which was a magnet for artistic renegades and a place of erotic refuge Isolated and arrestingly beautiful, the island of Capri has been a refuge for renegade artists and writers fleeing the strictures of conventional society from the time of Augustus, who bought the island in 29 BC after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, to the early twentieth century, when the poet and novelist Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen was in exile there after being charged with corrupting minors, to the 1960s, when Truman Capote spent time on the island. We also meet the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Lenin, and Gorky, among other astonishingly vivid characters. Grounded in a deep intimacy with Capri and full of captivating anecdotes, Jamie James's Pagan Light tells how a tiny island served as a wildly permissive haven for people--queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy--who had nowhere else to go., A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice " Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young Man A rich, intimate embrace of Capri, which was a magnet for artistic renegades and a place of erotic refuge Isolated and arrestingly beautiful, the island of Capri has been a refuge for renegade artists and writers fleeing the strictures of conventional society from the time of Augustus, who bought the island in 29 BC after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, to the early twentieth century, when the poet and novelist Jacques d'Adelsw rd-Fersen was in exile there after being charged with corrupting minors, to the 1960s, when Truman Capote spent time on the island. We also meet the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Lenin, and Gorky, among other astonishingly vivid characters. Grounded in a deep intimacy with Capri and full of captivating anecdotes, Jamie James's Pagan Light tells how a tiny island served as a wildly permissive haven for people--queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy--who had nowhere else to go.

LC Classification NumberDG975.C2J36 2019