“Prater Violet, in my view, is one of the best short novels in English written in this century.”
       —Stanley Kauffmann

“Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time. . . . a novel about movie writers, which is yet a novel about the life of every serious artist.”
       —Diana Trilling

“A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles the episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence.”
      —Edmund Wilson

“The best prose writer in English. . . . The later Isherwood is even better than the early cameraman.”
      —Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD(1902-1986) lived in Berlin from 1928 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in 20th-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than 20 books including the novels Prater Violet and a series of short stories, Goodbye to Berlin, that inspired the musical Cabaret.