Benjamin Ivry Libros

Ivry's biography of Francis Poulenc highlights the composer's wit and charm, often underestimated in value. It explores his music's simplicity and directness, alongside his homosexuality and love affairs in early 20th-century Paris. Utilizing newly published documents, the author offers a nuanced portrait of this complex composer.

English music hall songs, often comic in essence, were omnipresent in the United Kingdom from around 1850 until after 1918. Reflecting societal, political, racial, and gender attitudes, these concentrated communications reflected their historical moment. Sighing for the Silvery Moon: English Music Hall Songs Reexamined by Benjamin Ivry, a biographer and cultural reporter, focuses on the songs themselves in performance as preserved on early recordings and films. As reflections of bygone sensibilities they are time capsules, displaying the aspirations and character of a nation

French popular songs from 1870 to 1940 dynamically epitomize anguished eras of upheaval. Boldly advancing views on societal, political, economic, racial, and gender issues, these charming, alluring tunes express an expectation of life as tragedy. “Parlez-moi d’amour: Themes in French Popular Song from the Commune to World War II” by Benjamin Ivry, a biographer and cultural reporter, focuses on the songs themselves in performance as preserved on recordings. They encapsulate the positive and negative elements of Gallic culture, as they communicate love and hatred, exultation and woe.

Magellania —the region around the Strait of Magellan—is the home of Kaw-djer, a mysterious man of Western origin whom the indigenous people consider a demigod. A man whose motto is “Neither God nor master,” he has shunned Western civilization and its hypocrisies in order to live peacefully on an island claimed by no one. But when a storm strands a thousand immigrants on his island and they ask him to be the leader of their colony, Kaw-djer must decide whether to help them live and prosper in this foreign land at the end of the world or leave them to their fate. Jules Verne penned Magellania in 1897, following the death of his brother and at a time when his own health was beginning to fail. Originally titled Land of Fire and At the End of the World , Magellania was intended to reflect Verne’s deeply held religious and political beliefs as well as examine his own mortality. This first English translation of the original manuscript shows Magellania to be a unique, forceful novel that widens the scope of Verne’s literary legacy.