Vanishing Streets
Journeys in London
-
- USD 9.99
-
- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writer and film critic Tyree (coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies), who was born and raised in the U.S. and studied at Cambridge in the 1990s, guides readers through his favorite spots in London and his enamoured understanding of the city's nuances (filmic, sociopolitical, documentarian, and romantic). The book is divided into four sections, each composed of a variety of a variety of forms essays, a suggested tour itinerary, a review of a 1929 book to provide vivid scenes of suburbs, poetic reflections on historical ruins, and a rather detailed sketch of 21st-century London from an informed American's position. Tyree demonstrates that when individuals seek out the unfamiliar, follow curiosity, or place themselves in foreign contexts, they create perspectives that can transform the world and their own worldviews. Tyree's personal and filmic experiences of London have shaped his intimate impression of the city into a complex adoration. Anglophile readers or those holding some familiarity with this world hub may find much to cherish, but some readers will struggle to follow Tyree's very specific references to neighborhoods and landmarks that are well beyond the typical tourist's experience of London. Tyree's lyrical prose is distinctly cinematic, describing sweeping landscapes interspersed with tight shots, close-ups, and all the drama and symbolism of character quests with director's commentary, resulting a fresh portrait of London and an intriguing travelogue. 30 halftones.