Thrilling Cities.
FLEMING, Ian. [Peter Matthiessen].
Thrilling Cities.
“SERVE ON HOT BUTTERED TOAST… WITH PINK CHAMPAGNE”: FIRST EDITION OF IAN FLEMING’S THRILLING CITIES; FROM THE LIBRARY OF PETER MATTHIESSEN
London: Jonathan Cape, 1963.
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Item Number: 151053
First edition of Fleming’s compelling travelogue. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. From the library of Peter Matthiessen with his bookplate to the front free endpaper. Peter Matthiessen remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008). A leading figure in fiction and non-fiction for six decades, he co-founded the famed Paris Review in 1953. A prominent environmental, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 at the age of 81 for Shadow Country. “No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea” (Michael Dirda). Fine in a near fine dust jacket. An exceptional association linking these two fine writers.
Ian Fleming’s world travels, interests, as well as his journalism and wartime experiences, lent authority to everything he wrote. In 1959, the Sunday Times commissioned Fleming to write a series of dispatches from the world’s most beguiling locales. The result was Thrilling Cities, a masterpiece of well-observed travelogue that stands ably alongside the author’s Bond canon. Here are Fleming’s highly personal observations of fourteen cities across Europe, Asia, and North America—from Vienna to Hong Kong to Chicago. At each stop, Fleming casts the guidebook aside, taking readers on an insider’s tour of everything from a Tokyo geisha house led by the world’s most beautiful women to a packed Las Vegas casino where fortunes ride on a roll of the dice, and beyond.
