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My Guru and His Disciple

Christopher Isherwood

Picador

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ISBN10: 1250254876
ISBN13: 9781250254870

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352 Pages

$19.00

CA$25.99

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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, scriptwriting conferences at MGM, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita.

Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.

Reviews

Praise for My Guru and His Disciple

"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."The New York Times Book Review

"In some ways, Isherwood's most ambitious book. There is a sense of wholeness and of the joy of spiritual quest. We can believe such a believer."The Boston Globe

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1902-1986) was born outside of Manchester, England, and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than twenty books. FSG Classics presents some of his finest work, including the novels Prater Violet, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River; the semi-autobiographical Lions and Shadows; and the memoir Christopher and His Kind.

Frances Homolka

The Christopher Isherwood Foundation