In Out of Africa, author Isak Dinesen takes a wistful and nostalgic look back on her years living in Africa on a Kenyan coffee plantation. Recalling the lives of friends and neighbours—both African and European—Dinesen provides a first-hand perspective of colonial Africa. Through her obvious love of both the landscape and her time in Africa, Dinesen’s meditative writing style deeply reflects the themes of loss as her plantation fails and she returns to Europe. HarperTorch brings great works of non-fiction and the dramatic arts to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperTorch collection to build your digital library.
Written to her family, these letters recount the failure of Dinesen's marriage, the financial collapse of her husband's coffee plantation, and her experiences in Kenya
Inside this book are stories about insects, piano teachers, talking birds, dead birds, ex-convicts, suicide attempts, tarot cards, and bible verses. Some of the stories happened to Korby and some of them he just made up. It doesn't really matter which are which. Up to this point in his life, he has been a professional singer-songwriter, traveling around by himself, playing songs for small audiences, selling CDs out of a suitcase. Occasionally there have been moments where the light shined particularly bright, but mostly it's just been him and a guitar, making music in living rooms and clubs and the occasional concert hall. He has met a lot of people, most of whom leaned like him toward the fringe side of the social spectrum. He's written some of them into stories hunched over a laptop in the backseat of a touring van, or in the lobby of a Best Western, or on the cracked vinyl couch of a rock club's green room, poking a keyboard with a pair of sweaty pointer fingers. And then when he was seven he fell in love with the Ramona Quimby books, and then it was the Great Brain books, and then the Roald Dahl. Most of his best friends have been characters from stories he's read. He's always been drawn to fiction because it tells you the truth you need to know. And the truth he needs to know is that, despite considerable advances in science and industry, the world is still a big fat piece of magic.
Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.
Judith Thurman’s brilliant, National Book Award–winning biography of Isak Dinesen—now with a new foreword by the author A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Dinesen’s magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established her as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman’s classic work explores Dinesen’s life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been—as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale—“a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other.” Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.
Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men. A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable stories in Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer. Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. Tall and graceful, with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch Hatton arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for the continent and their inimitable sense of style, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot; his passion that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.” In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.
Isak Dinesen and the land and people she loved are nowhere so real and compelling as in Longing for Darkness, written by Dinesen's majordomo, Kamante, and now boasting a smart new cover. Readers familiar with Out of Africa may recognize many of the enchanting stories. These celebrated tales and others are retold here from Kamante's perspective and are enhanced with his own drawings and letters, Dinesen's words and snapshots, and photographs by Peter Beard. Writes Beard, "Over a period of 12 years, as if divesting himself of his possessions, Kamante put down the extra dimensions of truth which are at the heart of Out of Africa."
