Download Free The Tangier Diaries Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Tangier Diaries and write the review.

Tangier in the 1960s and '70s was a fabled place. This edge city, the 'Interzone', became muse and escapist's dream for artists, writers, millionaires and socialites, who wrote, painted, partied and experienced life with an intensity and freedom that they never could back home. Into this louche and cosmopolitan world came John Hopkins, a young writer who became a part of the bohemian Tangier crowd with its core of Beats that included William Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin, as well as Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Yves Saint Laurent, Barbara Hutton and Malcolm Forbes. Those intoxicating decades - Tangier's 'Golden Years' - are long gone. Grand old houses that once sparkled with life are shuttered and dark and most of the eccentrics who once lived and loved in the city have died. But here, in the pages of John Hopkins' cult classic, all the decadence and flamboyance of those days is brought to life once more.
Princeton grad John Hopkins came to Tangier after adventures in Peru. In addition to the portraiture of the city and its inhabitants, Hopkins' life in Marrakech and his trips into Morocco's Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Spanish Sahara, Mauretania, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroun, Swaziland and Mozambique are chronicled in entries rich with detail. The glamour, mystery, poverty and opulence of Tangier, the country of Morocco and Africa jumps from every page. The author presents a huge and dizzying cast of writers, painters, socialites, trance dancers, eccentrics, party-givers, magicians, aristocrats, confidence men and expat residents from the early sixties through the late seventies. One encounters Paul and Jane Bowles, Barbara Hutton, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Princess Ruspoli, Malcolm Forbes, Tennessee Williams, Mohammed M'rabet, The Hon. David Herbert, Ira Bilankine, Ted Morgan, The Countess de Breteuil and her fabulous mud castle in Marrakech, The Lady Caroline Duff, Jim Wyllie, Elizabeth Vreeland, Jean Genet, Elizabeth David, Alec Waugh, Alfred Chester, Margaret Lane, Louise de Meuron, Adolfo de Velasco, Marguerite McBey and countless others. The Tangier Diaries includes eight pages of photographs, and is invaluable for anyone interested in Tangier and the colorful figures who have lived there.
Pepys never resumed the personal Diary which he abandoned in 1669 fearing he was going blind. He was one of the greatest accidental historians, never intending to record for posterity, but for amusement. This book makes these diaries available to the general reader. These documents enhance the picture of Pepys as a politician and civil servant.
While writing a novel set in South America, John Hopkins travelled back there to "reacquaint himself with the scene". In 1972-3, he travelled by train, bus and boat from Mexico City to the centre of the continent, through Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua and on to Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. Hopkins travelled slowly, deliberately, savouring every experience along the way. But the journey was fraught with his angst-ridden strivings to write his novel and with the troubled love he had for Madeleine, his travelling companion. In these heat-scorched, tequila-infused pages, Hopkins paints a sultry, exquisite portrait of South America and in so doing masters an art that he believed would forever elude him.
In this first guide to Tangier's extraordinary cultural history , former BBC North Africa correspondent Richard Hamilton explores the city to find out what has inspired so many international writers, artists and musicians. In Tangier, the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri wrote, 'everything is surreal and everything is possible.' In this intimate portrait, Hamilton explores hotels, cafés, alleyways and the city's darkest secrets. Delving down through complex historical layers, he finds a frontier town that is comic, confounding and haunted by the ghosts of its past. Samuel Pepys thought God should destroy Tangier and St Francis of Assisi called it a city of 'madness and delusions.' Yet, throughout the centuries, it has also been a crucible of creativity. It was a turning point in Henri Matisse's artistic journey and had a profound impact on the founder of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones. Tangier also produced two of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century: The Sheltering Sky and Naked Lunch. Besides Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, the book also looks at lesser known characters such as the flawed genius, Brion Gysin, as well as Ibn Battuta, who travelled three times further than Marco Polo. Featuring a thrilling cast of pirates, sultans, artists, musicians, writers, princes and playboys, this is an essential read about Tangier.
It all began at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, New York, in 1961 - Two Princeton graduates - John Hopkins and Joe McPhillips - have returned from Peru. Loathe to return to a life of work, marriage and mortgages, they are tempted by a mysterious letter from Kenya. Hatching a plan to ride a motorbike across North Africa, they buy a sleek, white R50 BMW and paint her name - 'The White Nile' - on the fuel tank, in honour of the route they plan to follow. In limpid, elegant prose, Hopkins describes deadly salt deserts and fig-laden oases, disappeared travellers and the funerals of young Tunisians killed in the battle for independence. He conjures up the ghosts of ancient Rome in Leptis Magna and of Homer's Lotus Eaters in Djerba . They encounter armed vigilantes in the Tunisian desert and outrun Libyan border patrols, barely escaping with their lives. They climb the pyramids of Giza at dawn and ride the 'Desert Express' across the wastelands of the Nubian Desert, but their final adventure, at Sam Small's Impala Ranch, is perhaps the most surreal of all -
Starting with Oscar Wilde and André Gide in the 1890's, for the next 100 years North Africa was to be a favourite destination for gay men seeking a mixture of sea, sand, sunshine and maybe something else. This book relates the adventures and antics of those gay travellers and expats in the three countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia between 1890 and 1990. Much of it is based on their own words given to us in interviews. Many of the destinations mentioned here along the north African coast were visited by either Wilde, Gide or Genet. But it is Tangier where we spend the most time, since that city was for over fifty years the Mecca of gay travellers. So as you read, imagine yourself up in the Kasbah of each of the old cities, looking down and seeing what those gays are doing down in the main part of the town. We are sure you will find something of interest.
The diary is a genre that is often thought of as virtually formless, a "capacious hold-all" for the writer’s thoughts, and as offering unmediated access to the diarist’s true self. Focusing on the diaries of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Joe Orton, John Cheever, and Sylvia Plath, this book looks at how six very different professional writers have approached the diary form with its particular demands and literary potential. As a sequence of separate entries the diary is made up of both gaps and continuities, and the different ways diarists negotiate these aspects of the diary form has radical effects on how their diaries represent both the world and the biographical self. The different published editions of the diaries by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath show how editorial decisions can construct sometimes startlingly different biographical portraits. Yet all diaries are constructed, and all diary constructions depend on how the writer works with the diary form.
An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa but just nine miles from Europe, Tangier is more than a destination, it is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts and writers for centuries – men and women breaking through artistic borders. The results were some of the most incendiary and influential books of our time and the list of outlaw originals is long, stretching from Ibn Battuta and Alexandre Dumas to Twain and Wharton and from the darkly brilliant Beats of Bowles, Kerouac, Gysin and Ginsberg to the great Moroccan novelists: Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet and Tahar Ben Jelloun.
Writing Tangier discusses an array of topics relating to the literature on Tangier from the seventeenth century to the present. Major questions include: Why has Tangier come to play an important role in contemporary world literary history as a signifier in the literary imagination; what is the nature of the inter-textual output produced through Paul Bowles' translations of the oral tales of a circle of uneducated storytellers (including Mohammed Mrabet and Larbi Layachi) and the text (For Bread Alone) brought to Bowles by the literate Mohamed Choukri; how do academics, artists, and writers who have been based in the city or who have written about it assess the various socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that have shaped its cultural production and the relationship of this production to the celebrated hybrid aspects of its identity; does the success of the literature of Tangier reflect a truly new multicultural cosmopolitanism, or does it stem from the fact that this literature is congenial to Westerners, that it is understood in terms that they themselves define, and that much of it (including productions in Arabic prepared with the expectation of translation) has even been «written to measure» for them?