Download or read book Casanova in Bohemia written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An erotic, comedic, and compulsively readable historical novel depicting the beguiling Giacomo Casanova as he looks back on a life of love and ribald adventure In Count Waldstein’s far-flung Bohemian castle, an aging Casanova spends his days as a librarian cataloging the count’s extensive collection of books. Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Ever the storyteller, Casanova instead dedicates himself to his own writing, for which the young servant Laura Brock serves as an endlessly fascinated audience. He recounts to her his greatest escapades—from romances in a Venetian convent to the seduction of an entire harem to the triumphant amassing (and subsequent loss) of a fortune in Paris. Enlivened by the French Revolution and the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment, Casanova’s latest exploits prove he still possesses an intellectual vigor and insatiable curiosity. Even old age can’t keep this legendary libertine—who corresponded with Voltaire, discussed flight with Benjamin Franklin, and whose life and writings inspired artists as diverse as Mozart, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Hesse—from causing trouble. Rich with eighteenth-century European social, political, and religious history, Casanova in Bohemia is an energetic and erotic portrait of Western literature’s most beloved lothario, whose hedonism was matched by his creativity and wit.
Download or read book Casanova in Bohemia written by Andrei Codrescu and published by . This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beloved NPR commentator and popular author Andrei Codrescu makes a stunning return to historical fiction, detailing the adventurous life and erotic times of the famed illuminist Giacomo Casanova. In his national bestseller The Blood Countess, Andrei Codrescu brought to life the bloodthirsty royal Elizabeth Bathory, who embodied nearly all the contradictions of the seventeenth century. Now he depicts the astonishing life of the legendary Casanova, as the old adventurer relives his life while writing his memoirs in a provincial Bohemian castle at the end of the eighteenth century. Far from being defeated by age, Casanova delights in the maidservants, reacts with intellectual vigor to the unfolding of the French Revolution, and collaborates with Mozart on Don Giovanni. Long considered the rhapsodist of an age of aristocratic mirth, scandal, and innumerable affairs, Casanova was also a first-rate intellect who corresponded and argued with Voltaire and Rousseau. His published work, besides the celebrated History of My Life, includes a multivolume fantasy fiction novel that predates and anticipates Jules Verne; translations of Italian classics into French; and a number of plays that were produced on the great stages of Europe. Casanova's romantic legend overshadowed his literary work, which was, for the most part, not published until 1960. The fate of his writings was nearly as fabulous and intriguing as that of their author. Still, even in abridged, bowdlerized, and fragmentary form, Casanova's memoirs have inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, and now, Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's vivid fictional account illuminates the interest we still have in this uncompromising and magical libertine, while it imagines how his life would have continued if Casanova's immortality had extended beyond the literary. In Codrescu's retelling of the Casanova legend, readers are introduced to an age far less inhibited than our own, and far more interesting in its vices. At once a libertine, a defender of women, a reactionary, a revolutionary, a brilliant observer, and a visionary, Casanova was a man ahead of his time both in thought and in action. Finally, in this inventive and absorbing work, Casanova is given due credit for his writings, his philosophies, and, of course, for the amorous magic that has been made known to so many.
Download or read book History of My Life written by Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt Casanova and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning translation of the complete memoirs of Casanova available for the first time in paperback. In volumes 5 and 6, Casanova brings his flight from the Inquisitor's prison in Venice to a happy conclusion. Exiled from Venice, he goes to Munich and Paris, where he establishes himself as a cabalist, makes a fortune in Holland, helps start the French State Lottery, goes on to Switzerland where he meets Voltaire. Because every previous edition of Casanova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, the literary world considered it a major event when Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text was published in six double volumes between 1966 and 1971. Trask's award-winning translation now appears in paperback for the first time.
Download or read book Casanova s Life and Times written by David John Thompson and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is both the life of Giacomo Casanova and a chronicle of eighteenth-century Europe. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was born the son of a moderately poor acting family at a time when the stage carried enormous social stigma. Yet in his own lifetime he achieved celebrity across Europe, rubbing shoulders with numerous of the eighteenth century's greatest men and women, from Frederick the Great to Catherine the Great, from Voltaire to Albrecht von Haller, from Pope Benedict XIV to Pope Clement XIII. It was a fame that had little to do with his romantic exploits. This was to come later, following upon the posthumous publication of his magnificent History of My Life. An adventurer and a man of learning, his was an extraordinary life whose story was intertwined with the story of eighteenth-century Europe. To try to understand this fascinating character we need also to try to understand the period in which he lived. This is the aim of Casanova's Life and Times.
Download or read book The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova written by Giacomo Casanova and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Casanova written by S. Guy Endore and published by New York : J. Day Company. This book was released on 1930 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Casanova written by Laurence Bergreen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” (Huffington Post)—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni. And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life. Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” (Kirkus Reviews).
Download or read book Casanova s Women written by Judith Summers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive profile of the eighteenth-century Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, whose name has become a synonym for seduction, looks at history's most famous lover from a female perspective, throwing light on a dangerous and beguiling man, as seen through the eyes of the women who loved him.
Download or read book Casanova written by Lydia Flem and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 1997 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an unconventional view of Casanova as a benevolent lover of women, an ardent believer in the Enlightment, who grew from a sickly Venetian infant, abandoned by his actress mother, to become a spirited voluptuary
Download or read book The Blood Countess written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “brilliant” novel of Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious sixteenth-century Hungarian aristocrat who bathed in the blood of virgins (St. Petersburg Times). Turmoil reigns in post-Soviet Hungary when journalist Drake Bathory-Kereshtur returns from America to grapple with his family history. He’s haunted by the legacy of his ancestor, the notorious sixteenth-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have murdered more than 650 young virgins and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. Interweaving past and present, The Blood Countess tells the stories of Elizabeth’s debauched and murderous reign and Drake’s fascination with the eternal clashes of faith and power, violence and beauty. Codrescu traces the captivating origins of the countess’s obsessions in tandem with the emerging political fervor of the reporter, building the narratives into an unforgettable, bloody crescendo. Taut and intense, The Blood Countess is a riveting novel that deftly straddles the genres of historical fiction, thriller, horror, and family drama.
Download or read book Casanova and His Time written by Edouard Maynial and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Casanova s Lovers Annotated written by Giacomo Casanova and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-18 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Fifty Shades of Grey, there was Casanova - the greatest womanizer in the world.In his old days, Casanova chased less women and started writing his memoirs instead. He "summed up" his first 48 years on 3600 pages. Note: be careful not to write too much - it looks like it affects your libido.It took me 122 hours to read his Memoirs. Occasionally he spent too much time on "unimportant" descriptions. Important ones are of course his affairs with women. These function better than Viagra. I occasionally told my wife about them and the result was always the same - sex.I wanted to share these side effects with others. My wife didn't let me read the "interesting" excerpts to her lady friends so I decided to collect them in this book.Please start reading this book. Read out aloud. Preferably in your bed with your wife next to you.This is an edited version of Casanova's memoirs which contains his numerous affairs with women:- It is edited to exclude long descriptions of events that are not related to Casanova's love affairs.- The book focuses only on the "juicy" parts of the memoirs and is annotated to provide context and natural flow of the stories when long explanations are removed.- The full memoirs comprise 12 volumes and approximately 3,500 pages. The books in this series have been condensed to 1,500 pages.
Download or read book The Poetry Lesson written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.
Download or read book New Orleans Mon Amour written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-01-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “lovely collection” of essays by the NPR commentator about his beloved adopted city, both before and after Hurricane Katrina (Publishers Weekly). NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has long written about the unique city he calls home. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots; the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable; and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “funny,” “gonzo,” and “wittily poignant”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur; does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras; befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics; and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost, but here Codrescu also writes about how the city’s heart still beats even after 2005’s devastating hurricane. New Orleans, Mon Amour is a portrait of an incomparable place, from a writer who “manages to be brilliant and insightful, tough and seductive about American culture” (The New York Times Book Review). “Finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world’s most talented, self-indulgent freaks. Codrescu finds himself quite at home there. He expertly weaves pages of New Orleans history through his stories of personal discovery and debauchery. . . . Readers can’t help coming away from reading it without an abiding hope in the ability of ordinary people, under the worst circumstances, rising to whatever challenges they face.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Casanova written by Ian Kelly and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Casanova, noted author Ian Kelly traces the life of Giacomo Casanova, a man whose very name is synonymous with sensuality, seduction and sexual prowess. But Casanova was more than just a great lover. A businessman, diplomat, spy, and philosopher, he authored more than twenty books, including a translation of The Iliad. Confidant to many infamous characters—including Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great—Casanova was undoubtedly charismatic. But how exactly did he seduce himself into infamy? In this richly drawn portrait, Casanova emerges as very much a product of eighteenth-century Venice. He reveled in its commedia del arte and Kelly posits that his successes as both a libertine and a libertarian grew from his careful study of its artifice and illusion. Food, travel, sex: Casanova’s great passions are timeless ones and Kelly brings to life in full flavor the grandeur of his exploits. He also articulates the fascinating personal philosophy that inspired Casanova’s quest to bed all manner of women. A riveting look at the life of the most legendary lover of all time, this is destined to become the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova.
Download or read book Casanova written by Ian Kelly and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A sheer testament to the power of the written word." (The New York Times) Giacomo Casanova's energy was dazzling. He made and lost fortunes, founded state lotteries, and wrote forty-two books and 3,600 pages of memoirs recording the tastes and smells of the years before the French Revolution-as well as his affairs and sexual encounters with dozens of women and a handful of men. Historian Ian Kelly draws on previously unpublished documents from the Venetian Inquisition, and documents by Casanova and his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and world. Kelly's research spans eighteenth-century Venice, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rome, Prague, and the Czech castle where Casanova lived, wrote, and died. From his devotion to kabbalah to his collaboration with Mozart and librettist Da Ponte on the opera Don Giovanni, from his vast appetite for food and sex to his training for the priesthood, Casanova reveled in the commedia dell'arte. And, as Kelly posits, it is from Casanova's careful study of its artifice and illusion that his success as both a libertine and a libertarian was founded.
Download or read book The Story of My Escape written by Giacomo Casanova and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe's greatest adventurer. Thrown into an escape-proof prison for a crime he probably committed. The question is, which crime? In 1755, the infamous Giacomo Casanova was locked up without trial in Venice's notorious Leads prison. Over 15 months he battled disease, madness, boredom, grotesque gaolers, bad books and fellow prisoners, before attempting the most audacious and typically flamboyant escape in history. This is Casanova's own account of the escape bid that made him a celebrity across Europe, full of his unique wit and philosophy, translated into English in full for the first time.
