Katherine Bucknell’s “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out”

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Katherine Bucknell about her new biography of Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. 

By LARB Radio HourSeptember 13, 2024

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Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Katherine Bucknell about her new biography of Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. The book moves along the horizons of Isherwood’s many journeys as a pathbreaking British writer whose work excavated fascist terrors and queer pleasures alike: in plays, films, memoir, voluminous diaries, and celebrated novels such as Goodbye to Berlin and A Single Man. Bucknell’s biography examines the tectonic forces of the 20th century that shaped Isherwood’s life and career, spanning two world wars, gay liberation, the AIDS crisis, and the spiritual awakening in America of the 1950s and ’60s. It brings into intimate relief an enigmatic writer whose experience shuttled between the visceral physicality of erotic desire and the gossamer abstractions of ascetic life, often-conflicted, but always yearning for deeper understanding, and committing everything to the page.