Search results for ""Author Lesley Chamberlain""

In 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Turin. This would be the year in which he wrote three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo; it would also be his last year of writing. He suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown in the first days of the following year. In this probing, elegant biography of that pivotal year, Lesley Chamberlain undoes popular clichés and misconceptions about Nietzsche by offering a deeply complex approach to his character and work. Focusing as much on Nietzsche's daily habits, anxieties and insecurities as on the development of his philosophy, Nietzsche in Turin offers a uniquely lively portrait of the great thinker, and of the furiously productive days that preceded his decline.

Read more less

With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II. German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.

Read more less

When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together searching insights on Rilke's life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke's inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality. In works of dazzling imagination and rich imagery, Rilke sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty.

Read more less

The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe, first published in 1989 and a companion volume to Lesley Chamberlain’s acclaimed The Food and Cooking of Russia, surveys the rich and diverse food cultures that were known to few people in the West during the half century when Europe was divided. It contains more than two hundred recipes interwoven with historical background and notes from the author’s extensive experiences traveling through Central and Eastern Europe. When originally published this practical cookbook revealed how the world’s most delicious sausages, goulash and sauerkraut, fruit dumplings, cheesecake, and many other dishes tasted in their homelands. Now, in a quite different political world, this book is a vital resource for remembering life before the Iron Curtain was lifted. This Bison Books edition contains period illustrations and a new introduction by the author that describes how dramatically this region and its food have changed since the end of Central and Eastern Europe’s isolation in 1989.

Read more less

An incisive and intimate account of the life and work of the great poet Rilke, exploring the rich interior world he created in his poetryWhen Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, as too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together searching insights on Rilke''s life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke''s inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality. In works of dazzling imagination and rich imagery, Rilke sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of

Read more less

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world. Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.

Read more less

Part manifesto, part artistic joke, Fillippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook is a provocative work about art disguised as an easy-to-read cookbook. Here are recipes for ice cream on the moon; candied atmospheric electricities; nocturnal love feasts; sculpted meats. Marinetti also sets out his argument for abolishing pasta as ill-suited to modernity, and advocates a style of cuisine that will increase creativity. Although at times betraying its author's nationalistic sympathies, The Futurist Cookbook is funny, provocative, whimsical, disdainful of sluggish traditions and delighted by the velocity and promise of modernity.Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born in 1876 to Italian parents and grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. He studied in Paris and obtained a law degree in Italy before turning to literature. In 1909 he wrote the infamous Futurist Manifesto, which championed violence, speed and war, and proclaimed the unity of art and life. Marinetti's life was fraught with controversy: he fought a duel with a hostile critic, was subject to an obscenity trial, and was a staunch supporter of Italian Fascism. Alongside his literary activities, he was a war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish War and served on the Eastern Front in World War II, despite being in his sixties. He died in 1944.Lesley Chamberlain is a novelist and historian of ideas. Her thirteen books include Nietzsche in Turin, The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud and The Food and Cooking of Russia. Suzanne Brill is an art historian and writer. She has translated several books for Italian art historians including Caro Pedretti's Leonardo: Architect, which was nominated for the John Florio prize.'A paean to sensual freedom, optimism and childlike, amoral innocence ... it has only once been answered, by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World' Lesley Chamberlain

Read more less