Overview

The 1908 Battle of Marrakech forms the narrative nucleus of Charles Beadle's first novel, now back in print for the first time since 1911. The battle resulted in the defeat of Sultan Aziz, who was deposed by his brother, the ""Pretender"" Sultan Moulay Hafid, whom Beadle interviewed a few months before Hafid usurped the throne. Although the details of the skirmish remain murky, historians regard Beadle's novel as the most accurate account of the conflict. The City of Shadows also portrays a story of forbidden love between Zahra, a young native Moroccan woman, and the protagonist, a British adventurer named Paul. Reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde, Zahra's declaration of love violates fundamental social hierarchies and religious traditions, yet she decides that punishment, banishment, or even death is a small price to pay for following her heart.

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9781963363074

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CHARLES BEADLE was a world traveler who was born at sea in 1881. When he was eighteen years old he expatriated from England and spent over a decade exploring South Africa, Rhodesia, Zambia, Uganda, the Congo, Mozambique, Borneo, and Morocco. In his mid-twenties he organized an expedition to Fez and traveled there disguised as a dancing girl to interview the sultan of Morocco. In the 1910s he lived in Montmartre, where he befriended his neighbor Beatrice Hastings, the mistress of Modigliani and translator of Max Jacob. Modigliani later portrayed Beadle in a drawing titled Le Pèlerin (""The Pilgrim""), which may have been a reference to Beadle's first banned book, A Passionate Pilgrimage. During World War I he traveled to the United States, where he published his stories in Adventure and in the International, a cultural journal edited by Aleister Crowley. He returned to the City of Light in the fall of 1919, where he lived throughout most of the 1920s, eventually moving to the French Riviera. In 1938 Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Beadle's last novel, Dark Refuge: an unrecognized modern masterpiece that quickly fell into obscurity. It contains thinly disguised portraits of Modigliani, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, Léopold Zborowski, and various other figures who haunted the Parisian demimonde of this period. Beadle's brazen portrayal of drug fueled pansexual orgies prevented the chronicle from being distributed in the Anglo-Saxon world despite its literary merit and lyrical beauty. In 1941 Faber and Faber published Artist Quarter, a nonfiction work pseudonymously coauthored by Beadle with Douglas Goldring, which is still considered to be the urtext of Modigliani biography. ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist. His publications have been praised in Evergreen Review, Publishers Weekly, New Art Examiner, Midwest Book Review, and Witty Partition. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Litera¬ture by Tyrone Simp¬son, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Thomas Fahy, Con¬ver¬sations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen's Forgotten Millions, a book about the home¬less. His interviews include conversations with Pu¬litz¬er Prize¬-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn nov¬elist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Ter¬rorism in Italy. Couteau has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett's The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe. Since 2020 he has devoted himself to republishing annotated texts of important but forgotten authors such as Stanley Marks, Charles Beadle, and Francis Carco. In 2023 he published Intimate Souvenirs, a memoir featuring an Introduction by Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.

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