{"title":"Francis Steegmuller","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrancis Steegmuller\u003c\/strong\u003e offers a richly detailed exploration of literary figures and classic texts, combining scholarly insight with engaging narrative. Readers can expect thoughtful biographies that illuminate the lives behind iconic works, such as his study of Flaubert and the creation of \u003cem\u003eMadame Bovary\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHis travel writing captures the spirit of place with elegant prose, bringing destinations like Naples vividly to life. This collection is ideal for those drawn to literary biography and evocative journeys through culture and history.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"the-ancient-shore-dispatches-from-naples-by-francis-steegmuller-9780226322025","title":"The Ancient Shore – Dispatches from Naples","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\u003cp\u003e“The two voices join in exquisite harmony... A lovely book.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47072369115372,"sku":"9780226322025","price":33.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/15448533482268.jpg?v=1765098674"},{"product_id":"flaubert-and-madame-bovary-by-francis-steegmuller-9781590171165","title":"Flaubert and Madame Bovary","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrancis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of \u003cem\u003eMadame Bovary\u003c\/em\u003e and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSteegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionise literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48147262636268,"sku":"9781590171165","price":55.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781590171165-flaubert-and-madame-bovary.jpg?v=1786447779"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/francis-steegmuller.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}