{"product_id":"the-ancient-shore-dispatches-from-naples-9780226322025","title":"The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples","description":"\u003cp\u003eBorn 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. \u003ci\u003eThe Ancient Shore\u003c\/i\u003e collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWith 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBeautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, \u003ci\u003eThe Ancient Shore\u003c\/i\u003e is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where 'nothing was pristine, except the light.'\"-\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"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, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.\"-\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eShirley Hazzard\u003c\/b\u003e is the acclaimed author of four books of nonfiction and six novels, including the National Book Award-winning \u003ci\u003eThe Great Fire\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cb\u003eFrancis Steegmuller\u003c\/b\u003e (1906-94) was an editor, translator, critic, and literary biographer.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50503131070738,"sku":"9780226322025","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_6190f69c-5280-421c-9457-35ee78dd86e0.jpg?v=1730783521","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-ancient-shore-dispatches-from-naples-9780226322025","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}