1913: The Year Before The Storm

Author: Florian Illies

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 35.00 NZD
  • : 9781846689642
  • : Profile Books Limited
  • : The Clerkenwell Press
  • :
  • : 0.31
  • : July 2013
  • : 216mm X 135mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 0.0
  • : August 2013
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Florian Illies
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  • : Paperback
  • : Aug-13
  • :
  • : English
  • : 940.288
  • : very good
  • :
  • : 304
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Barcode 9781846689642
9781846689642

Description

A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched documentary traces and biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate cultural portrait of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Kafka falls in love; Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet; a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique; Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract; and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Trieste, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow, their brief coincidences of existence telling of a darker future. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience; Proust sets out in search of lost time; and while Stravinsky celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes. Told with Illies's characteristic mixture of poignant evocation and laconic irony, 1913 is the story of the year that shaped the last century.

Promotion info

A moving true account of European society on the brink of war

Author description

Florian Illies was born in 1971. He has worked as literary editor for major German newspapers and magazines, and co-founded art magazine Monopol. His previous four books have sold over one million copies.