Description
Summit Books, Published 2025. Hardcover, xxiv, 534 pp.; 25 cm; First Edition (with full number line); illustrated with 16 unnumbered pages of black-and-white photographic plates.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
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Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Black cloth-covered boards, gold lettering on spine; mild shelf wear to covers. Binding tight; pages clean and unmarked. Illustrated dust jacket, an ochre sun-motif portrait of Cavafy on front, unclipped (UK price 30 pounds), with light bumping to edges and mild shelf wear. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover.A biography of the Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), drawing on deep archival research into his Alexandrian family, the family's years of displacement across Liverpool, London, and Istanbul, his return to Alexandria, and his slow, radical reinvention in middle age. The authors trace the friendships, erotic life, and ambitions behind the spare, philosophical style that made Cavafy one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux as Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography; this is the UK Summit Books edition.Contents: Abbreviations; Chronology of Events in C. P. Cavafy's Life; Preface: Writing Alexandrian Sphinx; Prologue; Part I, The Cavafy Family (The Family Council: Commerce, Culture, and Letters; Trauma, Exile, and Loss: The Flight to the Ottoman Capital; Family Affairs); Part II, Alexandria: The Dreamscape (Constantine's World; A Tale of Two Cities); Part III, Friends (Friendship and Intimacy: Cliques or Claques?; Peri: Aesthete, Artist, and Confidant; "It Would Have Been You": Timos Malanos and Alekos Sengopoulos; Interlude: Constantine's Reading); Part IV, Living for Poetry (Art Above Everything; The Big Poetic Change); Part V, Cultivating Fame (The Quest for Glory; Constantine's Literary Radius); Epilogue; Important People in C. P. Cavafy's Life; Notes; Works Cited; Acknowledgments; Index.