John Baxter Books In Order

Novels

The Off-Worlders (1968)
The Hermes Fall (1978)
Bidding (1980)
The Black Yacht (1982)
Torched (1986)
A Paris Christmas (2015)
Montparnasse (2017)

Novellas

The King Kong Syndrome (2014)

Anthologies edited

The Second Pacific Book of Science Fiction (1971)

Non fiction

Hollywood in the Thirties (1968)
Science Fiction in the Cinema (1969)
The Gangster Film (1970)
The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (1971)
The Cinema of John Ford (1971)
Hollywood in the Sixties (1972)
Ken Russell (1973)
Sixty Years of Hollywood (1973)
Stunt (1973)
The Fire Came by (1976)
The Hollywood Exiles (1976)
Who Burned Australia? (1984)
Filmstruck (1986)
Fellini (1993)
Steven Spielberg (1996)
Stanley Kubrick (1997)
Bunel (1998)
Woody Allen (1998)
Mythmaker (1999)
de Niro (2002)
A Pound of Paper (2002)
We’ll Always Have Paris (2005)
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World (2011)
The Inner Man (2011)
Chronicles of Od Paris (2011)
The Perfect Meal (2013)
Paris at the End of the World (2014)
Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light (2015)
Saint-Germain-des-Pres: Paris’s Rebel Quarter (2016)

Novels Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

The King Kong Syndrome
(2014)

Anthologies edited Book Covers

The Second Pacific Book of Science Fiction
(1971)

Non fiction Book Covers

John Baxter Books Overview

A Paris Christmas

A witty cultural and culinary education, Immoveable Feast is the charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread and didn’t speak a word of French unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family. Ernest Hemingway called Paris ‘a moveable feast’ a city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved to Paris to marry her. As a test of his love, his skeptical in laws charged him with cooking the next Christmas banquet for eighteen people in their ancestral country home. Baxter’s memoir of his yearlong quest takes readers along his misadventures and delicious triumphs as he visits the farthest corners of France in search of the country’s best recipes and ingredients. Irresistible and fascinating, Immoveable Feast is a warmhearted tale of good food, romance, family, and the Christmas spirit, Parisian style.

Hollywood in the Thirties

Softback, ex library, with usual stamps and markings, in fair all round condition.

The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg

Belligerent and evasive, Josef von Sternberg chose to ignore his illegitimate birth in Austria, deprived New York childhood, abusive father, and lack of education. The director who strutted onto the set in a turban, riding breeches, or a silk robe embraced his new persona as a world traveller, collected modern art, drove a Rolls Royce, and earned three times as much as the president. Von Sternberg traces the choices that carried the unique director from poverty in Vienna to power in Hollywood, including his eventual ostracism in Japan. Historian John Baxter reveals an artist few people knew: the aesthete who transformed Marlene Dietrich into an international star whose ambivalent sexuality and contradictory allure on screen reflected an off screen romance with the director. In his classic films The Blue Angel 1930, Morocco 1930, and Blonde Venus 1932, von Sternberg showcased his trademark visual style and revolutionary representations of sexuality. Drawing on firsthand conversations with von Sternberg and his son, Von Sternberg breaks past the classic Hollywood caricature to demystify and humanize this legendary director.

Steven Spielberg

As polished and perceptive a biography as you would hope from a writer who has done justice to Fellini and Bunuel.” New Statesman & Society Steven Spielberg is one of the cinema’s greatest enchanters, with a spellbinding capacity and a box office record matched by very few. His power now exceeds that of the greatest moguls of Hollywood’s golden era, and films like the Indiana Jones trilogy, ET,” Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Jurassic Park,” and the Oscar winning Schindler’s List” seen by billions around the world have forever changed the way movies are made. How was it that this movie brat” became one of the most formidable players on the global entertainment scene? John Baxter has applied considerable scholarship in his quest to discover what makes Spielberg tick, and it is a success story that he tells with relish. Now in paperback, with a filmography and 55 photographs. John Baxter is a film critic, novelist and biographer; among his many books are Bunuel, Fellini, The Hollywood Exiles, and The Cinema of John Ford. 460 pp 5 x 8 55 b/w photos

Stanley Kubrick

The most complete account yet of one of the most original and stimulating film makers of the post war years: Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lindon, Full Metal Jacket ! A biography of this pre eminent cultural figure is long overdue. Few film makers have managed to maintain their mystique over forty years; Kubrick succeeded by preparing his films for years, so that each distilled the essence of the zeitgeist. To the generation of the 1950s, he was one of the few directors to achieve, with Paths of Glory, the dignity and stature of the European cinema in an American film. To 1960s audiences, he’s the man who made both Dr Strangelove, the ultimate anti war movie, and the counter culture classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1970s he created that archetypal hymn to urban violence, A Clockwork Orange. In the 1980s, he put Stephen King on screen in The Shining. In continental Europe especially, Kubrick is regarded as one of the handful of great living film makers. Born in the Bronx in 1928 of Central European stock, Kubrick still lives in moody seclusion in Borehamwood, where he bought a house soon after moving to the UK in 1961.

Bunel

Bunuel stands among the greatest creative artists of the century. His films, from his collaborative Un Chien Andalou with Salvador Dali in 1928 to a late blossoming in the sixties and seventies with Belle de Jour, Viridiana, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, still retain their power to shock. In this superb biography, Luis Bu uel comes startlingly into the spotlight as an artist who disguised his sensitivity with cynicism and a calculated use of the grotesque.

Woody Allen

For the first time, the full life story of the filmmaker laureate: a smart and entertaining deconstruction of Woody Allen‘s genius, celebrity, and art. Born Allen Konigsberg in the Bronx, the man who came to direct some of the most celebrated comedies in movie history Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors is revealed in all his neurotic complexities in this adroit study by John Baxter. The first biography since the tabloids headlined Allen’s lurid breakup with Mia Farrow and his affair and subsequent marriage to her adopted daughter, Soon Yi, this illuminating chronicle of Allen’s career from his days writing jokes for Sid Caesar to his eventual fame as filmdom’s quintessential New Yorker details the often scandalous success that Allen has achieved as screenwriter, actor, and director. And Baxter’s compelling saga never fails to uncover Allen’s calculated construction of the Woody persona and how far the hapless, obsessive character on screen is from the actual man. ‘Intelligently points out the gap between the shambling on screen character that Allen created and the successful, controlling artist.’ New York Times Book Review

Mythmaker

George Lucas is one of the most innovative and commercially successful players on the movie scene today. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, together with the three ‘Indiana Jones’ films all six of which he conceived, produced, and co wrote comprise the most popular group of films ever made. Lucas masterminded a revolutionary shift in the control of funding and profits of Hollywood films away from the studios into the hands of the filmmakers themselves. His state of the art film exhibition techniques such as THX sound systems have transformed the cinematic experience, and his Industrial Light & Magic is the finest special effects studio in the world. Yet he has remained an enigma and a recluse until now.

de Niro

The life of Hollywood’s number one movie actor, the elusive Robert de Niro, who shuns the limelight and rarely gives interviews, written by the film critic and biographer of Spielberg, Kubrick, Woody Allen and George Lucas. de Niro is the pre eminent Hollywood character performer of our time: film portraits like the young Don Vito Corleone in ‘The Godfather II’, Jake La Motta in ‘Raging Bull and Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’ are some of the most vivid put on celluloid. de Niro cannot be cast to type, prefers to work for old friends like Martin Scorsese, and rarely plays anything but 20th century roles. The author discusses de Niro‘s film roles as well as his often controversial private life.

A Pound of Paper

In the rural Australia of the fifties where John Baxter grew up, reading books was disregarded with suspicion, owning and collecting them with utter incomprehension. Despite this, by the age of eleven Baxter had ‘collected’ his first book The Poems of Rupert Brooke. He’d read the volume often, but now he had to own it. This was the beginning of what would become a major collection and a lifelong obsession. His book hunting would take him all over the world, but his first real find was in London in 1978, when he spotted a rare copy of a Graham Greene children’s book while browsing on a stall in Swiss Cottage. It was going for 5 pence. This would also, fortuitously, be the day when he first encountered one of the legends of the book selling world: Martin Stone. At various times pothead, international fugitive from justice, and professional rock musician, he would become John’s mentor and friend. In this brilliantly readable and funny book, John Baxter brings us into contact with such literary greats as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. But he also shows us how he penetrated the secret fraternity of ‘runners’ or book scouts sleuths who use bluff and guile to hunt down their quarry and joined them in scouring junk shops, markets, auction rooms and private homes for rarities. In the comic tradition of Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs, A Pound of Paper describes how a boy from the bush came to be living in a Paris penthouse with a library worth millions. It also explores the exploding market in first editions. What treasures are lying unnoticed in your garage?

We’ll Always Have Paris

For more than a century, pilgrims from all over the world seeking romance and passion have made their way to the City of Light. The seductive lure of Paris has long been irresistible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life. Globe trotting film critic and writer John Baxter heard her siren song and was bewitched. Now he offers readers a witty, audacious, scandalous behind the scenes excursion into the colorful all night show that is Paris interweaving his own experience of falling in love, with a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary caf’s of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls.

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional ‘literary walking tour’ guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years. In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving ‘literary walking tours’ through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris’s legendary artists and writers of the past. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters: the favorite caf’s of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Pablo Picasso’s underground Montmartre haunts; the bustling boulevards of the late nineteenth century fl neurs; the secluded ‘Little Luxembourg’ gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; the alleys where revolutionaries plotted; and finally Baxter’s own favorite walk near his home in Saint Germain des Pr s. Paris, by custom and design, is a pedestrian’s city each block a revelation, every neighborhood a new feast for the senses, a place rich with history and romance at every turn. The Most Beautiful Walk in the World is your guide, par excellence, to the true, off the beaten path heart of the City of Lights.

Chronicles of Od Paris

Discover one of the world’s most fascinating and beautiful cities through 29 dramatic true stories spanning the rich history of Paris. From the headless walk of Saint Denis to the seances of the Surrealists, experience 2,000 years of history as John Baxter leads 8 walking tours following in the footsteps of Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Ernest Hemingway and many other innovators, artists and expats who found inspiration in the City of Light. Step back in time and experience the city s living history captured in such films as Woody Allen s Midnight in Paris.