The Ancient Shore – Dispatches from Naples

Shirley Hazzard, Francis Steegmuller, Francis Steegmuller

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English

Chicago University Press
01 September 2009

Travel & holiday; Travel writing

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present.

With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.

Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.

“Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum

“Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

By: Shirley Hazzard, Francis Steegmuller, Francis Steegmuller
Imprint: Chicago University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 215mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 9mm
Weight: 192g
ISBN: 9780226322025
ISBN 10: 0226322025
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 01 September 2009
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Shirley Hazzard is the acclaimed author of four books of nonfiction and six novels, including the National Book Award - winning The Great Fire. Francis Steegmuller (1906-94) was an editor, translator, critic, and literary biographer.

Reviews for The Ancient Shore – Dispatches from Naples

""Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where 'nothing was pristine, except the light.'"" - Bookforum ""Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place."" - Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times ""The two voices join in exquisite harmony.... A lovely book."" - Booklist, starred review ""An exquisite companion for the armchair traveler who dreams in the languages of literature and art.... A love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea.... By temperament, I incline toward the understated appreciations of art and people I find in The Ancient Shore.... Such passages, simple as they are, constitute the unalloyed traces of love."" - Mindy Aloff, Washington Post Book World""