Prater Violet concerns the filming of an unashamedly romantic and commercial musical about old Vienna. It is a stinging satirical novel about the film industry, trifling studio feuds, and the fatuous movie Prater Violet, which, ironically, counterpoints the tragic events on the world stage as Hitler's lengthening shadow falls over the real Vienna of the thirties. At its center are vivid portraits of the mocking genius Friedrich Bergmann, the imperious,...

"Presents two complete novels of Christopher Isherwood, Prater violet (1945) and A single man (1964) with episodes from three other novels: A Berlin diary and Sally Bowles from Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Mr. Lancaster from Down there on a visit (1962); and a section describing the young W.H. Suden from lines and shadows (1938)." --

Consisting of four accounts of encounters with four male characters, each of them visited by a different Christopher Isherwood, and each set in a different time and place, Berlin in the 1920s (overlapping the time period of the Berlin Stories), the Greek Isles in the early 1930s, London in the late 1930s and California in 1940, this acclaimed novel explores Isherwood's fundamental concerns with the choice of a way of life, and its implications for...

"Two English brothers meet, after a long separation, in India. Oliver, the idealistic younger brother, prepares to take his final vows as a Hindu monk. Patrick, a successful publisher with a wife and children in London and a male lover in California, has publicly admired his brother's convictions while privately criticizing his choices. First published in 1967, A Meeting by the River delicately depicts the complexity of sibling relationships - the...

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. Classics of modern fiction, these novellas capture 1931 Berlin - charming, grotesque, and dangerous, as Hitler was ascending to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters, in particular the nightclub performer Sally Bowles, whose misadventures were popularized on stage and screen in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

A crippled woman who is cured by a healer has him fall in love, then unscrupulously exploits his talent to enrich herself. The novel is based on a film treatment which was written by Huxley and Isherwood while in Hollywood in the 1920s.