Böcker av Jamie James

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young ManA rich, intimate embrace of Capri, which was a magnet for artistic renegades and a place of erotic refugeIsolated and arrestingly beautiful, the island of Capri has been a refuge for renegade artists and writers fleeing the strictures of conventional society from the time of Augustus, who bought the island in 29 BC after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, to the early twentieth century, when the poet and novelist Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen was in exile there after being charged with corrupting minors, to the 1960s, when Truman Capote spent time on the island. We also meet the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Lenin, and Gorky, among other astonishingly vivid characters. Grounded in a deep intimacy with Capri and full of captivating anecdotes, Jamie James's Pagan Light tells how a tiny island served as a wildly permissive haven for people-queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy-who had nowhere else to go.

In The Glamour of Strangeness, James evokes extraordinary lives in portraits that bring the transcultural artist into sharp relief. Drawing on his career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating study of the powerful connection between art and the exotic.

For centuries, scientists and philosophers believed that the universe was a stately, ordered mechanism, both mathematical and musical. The perceived distances between objects in the sky mirrored (and were mirrored by) the spaces between notes forming chords and scales.

20th-century science and music, argues Jamie James, have rejected the Romantic separation of the two. The book provides a survey of the history of science and music, a reassessment of Romanticism and the modernist reaction to it, and a radical intellectual journey.