{"product_id":"lions-and-shadows-9780374535308","title":"Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eLions and Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e blends autobiography and fiction to describe the true education of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to dropoutatlarge in London's bohemia of the 1920s. Forced to withdraw from Cambridge University, \"Christopher Isherwood\" works as a tutor to the privileged, serves as the secretary to a busy string quartet, ill-fatedly attends medical school. Licensed by names he invents, he works up extravagant portraits of his brilliant contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion changed the literary identity of England in the 1930s. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAlthough the story is Isherwood's own life story, carrying him up to the age of twenty-five, he gives free rein to his remarkable powers of dramatization, improving on the facts here and there, to make a highly entertaining, sometimes hilarious book. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Read it as a novel,\" says Isherwood. There is no difficulty taking his advice. But his characters were real people, and when \u003ci\u003eLions and Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e was first published, in 1938, it transformed their lives into legend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eChristopher Isherwood\u003c\/b\u003e (1904-1986) was born in 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 \u003ci\u003ePrater Violet\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Single Man\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eA Meeting by the River\u003c\/i\u003e; the semi-autobiographical \u003ci\u003eLions and Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e; and the memoir \u003ci\u003eChristopher and His Kind\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50323829621010,"sku":"9780374535308","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_bb05c49f-39da-45b4-a101-c1b7d3d4cfc5.jpg?v=1727661591","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/lions-and-shadows-9780374535308","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}