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riverrun announces release date for biography of Burton and Taylor acquired in 2010
The release date for Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis, first acquired by riverrun in 2010, has been announced.
World rights in all languages were acquired from Leslie Gardner of Artellus by Jon Riley, riverrun publisher. Thirteen years in the waiting, Erotic Vagrancy takes the lives and work of the last century’s ultimate glamour couple as its raw material to tell the story of an age of glorious excess, in what Sir David Hare has called a “hot thunderstorm of a book”.
The publisher added that it is about the clash of worlds: of South Wales and Old Hollywood; the fantasies we have about film stars and the fantasies that Burton and Taylor had about one another.
Lewis said: “This is a book about more than it seems at first to be about… It is an infernal story; an alcoholic story; a Pop Art story; an occult story… Burton and Taylor were icons of indulgence, animal spirits. They represented glamour, sensationalism, lives lived to the full (diamonds, fur coats, private jets), with every emotion ready to be experienced before the cameras. With Burton and Taylor, the barriers between art and the world finally dissolved. They didn’t have to do anything, save exist. Their ripeness was all.”
Lewis is the author of Seasonal Suicide Notes (Short Books) and books on Anthony Burgess, Laurence Olivier, Charles Hawtrey and Peter Sellers. The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Arrow) was made into an award-winning film by HBO, starring Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron (as Britt Ekland). Stanley Tucci played Stanley Kubrick.
