Background
Alan Isler was born on September 12, 1934, in London, the United Kingdom.
(Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End...)
Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End Avenue as Otto Korner, the narrator, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents of a retirement home in a production of Hamlet, all the while recalling his life's adventures spanning the 20th century in Europe and then America. Korner is a Holocaust survivor, and the arrival of a luscious new employee who bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he had loved in his youth throws him back into the past. The narrator weaves together past and present, with events cresting at the performance of Hamlet. Though the machinations of the Emma Lazarus retirement home's Dickensian residents are always in the novel's foreground, the character and history of the narrator, Hamlet-like himself, are gradually revealed as the story's integral backdrop. His flashbacks include his precocious beginnings as a would-be poet, his bungled encounters with the incipient Dada movement and with Lenin in World War I Zurich, his first marriage and his life in Weimar Germany during the rise of Hitler, his experience of the Holocaust, and his immigration to the United States and second marriage. Little by little, and with increasing urgency, he is forced to confront truths about himself that he had thought safely buried. These unwelcome memories are interspersed (and overlap) with the current doings at the retirement home, the hilarious rivalries, factions, jockeying for position, and passionate love affairs of the residents. The novel ends on the night of the first public performance of the Emma Lazarus Old Vic's production of Hamlet, shortly after the last of Otto Korner's secrets is wrung from him. His is a story of life's chaos, complexity, richness -and moral dilemmas. It is a story of how our human qualities - pride, envy, timidity - can sometimes lead us to unintentionally hurt or even destroy those we love.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140245146/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(It is 1974 and Nicolas Kraven, lecturer in English Litera...)
It is 1974 and Nicolas Kraven, lecturer in English Literature at Mosholu College in the Bronx, is adrift upon a sea of troubles: his affair with his neighbour's wife threatens to progress from Thursday night to permanence; his students are a mixture of campus revolutionaries, predatory sexual exhibitionists and an old man intent on proving Merlin was a Jew; an elderly academic specialist in Love, possessor of a devastatingly effective aphrodisiac and a libido that belies her years, has alarming designs on his person; the Kraven demons, a familial curse, are in hot pursuit; and a spectre from his past, the one man who can smash this already chaotic life into ruins, is expected imminently. Kraven flies to London, where he finds brief consolation in the arms of Candy Peaches, a stripper from Sausalito, and then to Harrogate, the town to which he was evacuated as a child, there to confront the ghost of his father, and to slay Kraven's demons.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0063HBOHW/?tag=2022091-20
1996
Alan Isler was born on September 12, 1934, in London, the United Kingdom.
Isler graduated from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961. Next year, he received his Master of Arts degree at Columbia University. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree specializing in sixteenth-century literature in 1966.
Aflter leaving his native England for the United States at age 18, Isler served in the US Army from 1954 to 1956. Next year he started his education, and only in 1965, he started his career as a professor of English at Huron College, University of Western Ontario. Two years later he started teaching Renaissance Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. He worked there till 1995. Since then, Isler worked as a freelance writer. In 1971-1972 Isler was also a visiting lecturer at Tel-Aviv University.
Isler is best known for his first novel “The Prince of West End Avenue”, which took many awards and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published four other works during his career: “Kraven Images” (1996); “The Bacon Fancier” (1999); “Clerical Errors” (2002); and “The Living Proof” (2005). Isler was also a contributor to periodicals, including University of Toronto Quarterly.
(It is 1974 and Nicolas Kraven, lecturer in English Litera...)
1996(Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End...)
1995
