Edmund White

In a damp, old sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author of The Red Badge of Courage has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of a Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream.Though Crane's days are numbered, he and Cora live riotously, running up bills they'll never be able to pay, receiving visitors like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and even planning a mad dash to Germany's Black Forest, where Cora hopes a leading TB specialist will provide a miracle cure.Then, in the midst of the confusion and gathering tragedy of their lives, Crane begins dictating a strange novel. The Painted Boy draws from Crane's erstwhile journalist days in New York in the 1890s, a poignant story about a boy prostitute and the married man who ruins his own life to win the boy's love. Crane originally planned the book as a companion piece to Maggie, Girl of the Streets, but abandoned it when literary friends convinced him that such scandalous subject matter would destroy his career. Now, with his last breath, Crane devotes himself to refashioning this powerful novel, into which he pours his fascination with the underworld, his sympathy for the poor, his experiences as a reporter among New York's lowlife—and his complex feelings for his own devoted wife.Seamlessly flowing between the vibrant, seedy atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Manhattan and the quiet Sussex countryside, Hotel de Dream tenderly presents the double love stories of Cora and Crane, and the painted boy and his banker lover. The brilliant novel-within-a-novel combines the youthful simplicity of Crane's own prose with White's elegant sense of form, offering an unforgettable portrait of passion in all its guises.

By a Marathi poet and social reformer.

From Amazon.com: “One has the impression, reading The Flâneur, of having fallen into the hands of a highly distractible, somewhat eccentric poet and professor who is determined to show you a Paris you wouldn’t otherwise see…Edmund White tells such a good story that I’m ready to listen to anything he wants to talk about.”—New York Times Book Review A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through city streets in search of adventure and fulfillment. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. In the hands of the learned White, a walk through Paris is both a tour of its lush, sometimes prurient history and an evocation of the city’s spirit. The Flâneur leads us to bookshops and boutiques, monuments and palaces, giving us a glimpse into the inner human drama. Along the way we learn everything from the latest debates among French lawmakers to the juicy details of Colette’s life.

From the foreword by Felice Picano: "This volume makes no attempt to rival those gay travel guides that already exist. It is something different, far more intriguing: a collection of stories that aim at being what Herman Melville deemed "an inside narrative." That is, what being a gay man in a foreign land really feels like, smells like, tastes like, and hurts like. The voices here might be likened to those of friends sitting around a dinner table the night before your journey who provide you with insights and warnings that only later do you discover add infinitely to your excursion."

The Violet Quill Club brought together the finest and most important gay writers to emerge after the Stonewall riots. Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, George Whitmore, and Christopher Cox--these are the writers whose novels, plays, short stories, essays, and journalism defined what it was to be gay before that first announcement of AIDS.

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

A meticulously researched biography of Jean Genet, one of France's most notorious writers. Acclaimed novelist and essayist Edmund White illuminates Genet's experiences in the worlds of crime, homosexuality, politics, and high culture, and gives a compelling analysis of Genet's plays, novels, and essays. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

From Amazon.com: In French caracole means "prancing"; in English, "caper." Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In Caracole, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours. "A seduction through language, a masque without masks, Caracole brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: the idea of the romantic."--Cynthia Ozick

Edmund White is a patriarch of gay American literature. A Boy's Own Story is the first of his trio of autobiographical novels (followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony). It begins with experiments and realizations of adolescence and proceeds through his firsthand account of the Stonewall uprising.

From Amazon.com: In this city-by-city description of the way homosexual men lived in the late seventies, Edmund White gives us a picture of Gay America that will surprise gay and straight readers alike. With great wit and humor, the co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex tells what goes on behind the glittering surface of fashionable nightspots and glamorous resorts. But he also shows us gay engineers, gay computer experts, and gay cowboys; this is a look at a vast world never before documented. By introducing us to a wide variety of gay people, White gives us remarkable new insights into what it means to be gay in America. In States of Desire, you will meet a gay timber baron from Portland and a "big-wig" (literally as well as figuratively) in the Florida drag world. Here are: handsome lifeguards in Chicago—those "bronzed demigods . . . who lord it above us on their white wood towers"; a Hollywood host who has just spent "a typical L.A. day, driving 150 miles assembling the twelve ingredients for supper"; a San Franciscan who embraces his friends "with long, therapeutic hugs, silently searching their faces for the weather report of their subtlest, innermost feelings"; and Boston gay radicals, who defend some of the most controversial positions that concern society today. You will hear the stories of gay Cubans in Miami, a gay lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and even a self-appointed gay Mormon prophet in Salt Lake City—all narrated with a novelist's fine ear for nuance. Into this vivid tapestry of people and places the author weaves the pros and cons of such issues as gay radicalism, the "urban gay renaissance" and the much discussed gay penchant for hedonism and sexual extremism. Above all, White shows the remarkable possibilities for gay life today—from the black gay ghettos of Atlanta to communes in New England; from "friendship networks" in New York City to New Orleans-style "uptown marriages" (in which men live with wife and children uptown and keep a boy in the Quarter); from Kansas City, where the self-oppression of 1950s gay life still reigns supreme, to Fire Island's unrivaled "spectacle of gay affluence and gay-male beauty." For this eye-opening book makes clear that gay life is every bit as rich and varied as the many gay lives the author so effectively describes

282 pages ; 20 cm

From the New York Times Book Review: Was it Wilkie Collins who wrote the first detective novel? I'm inclined to think detective fiction may be older, the oldest vehicle for the novel, the necessary form. Who exactly is Tom Jones; what is Mr. Rochester's secret; what sort of fellow can this Osmond be? These are mysteries to be solved, and their solutions, chapter by chapter, generate novels. It is the reader who plays private investigator throughout--as in fact he does in the standard detective novel--sifting through the author's clues and relishing the evidence. As he grows more wily, his first question, "What is Ahab up to?," changes into "What is Melville up to?" He reads "The Trial" and Kafka becomes a principal suspect, his work a plot. Each new novel by Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet or Gass implicitly dares readers to match wits with the author's deception. We grow more cunning, they more devious. This nearly inscrutable mystery by Edmund White is a Chinese puzzle. The East of its setting is our own East Coast, but also, subtly, the Orient. On page after page the ancient classics of the East underlie the text. The chinoiserie of the narrator's hard, gemlike style is at all points poetically controlled. And his story is told with a trompe-l'oeil realism that evaporates--while we are looking right at it--into the thin air of a charade: an Oriental court ritual. One fine summer day a young man wakes up in a cottage full of older men and--who is he? He hasn't a clue, and neither do we. His predicament is Kafka-esque. It may be amnesia. He doesn't know his own name. He can't recall any of these people. Instead of asking questions, however, he plays detective. All he has to do is watch his companions closely, and they will inevitably supply him with clues. He does watch, ever so closely, and the clues in "Forgetting Elena" turn out to be the bitter stuff of satire. For he inhabits a catty male beach society ruled by cliques, impressed by archness, enamored of 10-year-old boy dancers, in love with put-down, thrilled by camp, vamp, and very damp wit. To deduce and induce his own identity, he participates--passively--in a contest between the two strongest characters in this puzzle, each of whom slyly struggles to possess him. The Dark Lady on this fiery island is an unnamed charmer whom the reader quickly surmises must be the forgotten Elena of the title. She seems to want something from the young man. What can it be? He has forgotten not only the woman but love, and he must labor to decipher sex. "Similarity of position would suggest that her cleft was the counterpart to my penis.... When will this end? Shall we continue to lick and massage each other all night until exhaustion puts a stop to our work?" In question is the young man's sexual identity, not only his name and personal past. The lady's rival for his loyalty and affection is Herbert, the Arbiter Elegantarium among the beach boys and their female consorts, and devotee of short poems improvised and exchanged in the Oriental manner. The man-without-name is fascinated by Herbert's casual authority and control of punctilio. "As I hung the towel beside the stove to dry, I hummed a song--the same song Herbert had hummed when he had done the dishes after lunch. I didn't know its title; I certainly hope it was as appropriate to eleven in the evening as it must have been to two-thirty in the afternoon!" In fact, he is as desperately anxious to avoid the gauche as Kafka's K. is to deny his guilt. Kafka's heroes are apt to overheat themselves as they wrestle with their mysteries. This young man is a master of reserve and a connoisseur of face-saving techniques, skilled at avoiding absurdity, careful never to humiliate himself. He is reluctant even to ask the absurd question, "Who am I?" When he does, Elena laughs. "Forgetting Elena" is a masterful piece of work, I have no doubt of that. The trouble lies in the contrivance. There is something so unfailingly petty about the narrator's apprehensions ("I had no idea whether it was good form or bad to speak to Herbert in this assemblage") and something so oppressive about his preoccupations (Bob "neglected to pull the door all the way shut behind him. Had the others seen this new impropriety, I wondered") that it is often difficult to be receptive to the book's genuine wonders. Nevertheless, all his obsessions, no matter how trivial, especially his concern with the most trifling protocol, are so many clues to the final revelation. The narrator himself turns out to be the target of an irony so profound that, by contrast, Elena and Herbert and everyone else against whom his whiplash-fine observations are directed, comes off considerably better than he does. "Forgetting Elena" satirizes itself. Its poetic brilliance is more precious and more devious than the precious deviousness it scrutinizes. Moreover, it precisely strives for that effect from the start, the effect of a "charade or hieroglyph." When it ends, my private eye tells me that the young man knew himself better before he found out who he was. That may be a virtue in a detective story as far-reaching as this one, the tale of a sleuth who strives to detect the mystery of the self. All in all, "Forgetting Elena" amounts to an astonishing first novel, obsessively fussy, and yet uncannily beautiful.

Seven stories that examine the various effects of AIDS on gay men, their families and their way of life. Adam Mars-Jones: Slim ; An executor ; A small spade ; Remission Edmund White: Palace days ; An oracle ; Running on empty

From Amazon.com: The Edmund Trilogy #3 Following A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy. Named for the work by Haydn in which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until only a single violin remains playing, this is the story of a man who has outlived most of his friends. Having reached the six-month anniversary of his lover's death, he embarks on a journey of remembrance that will recount his struggle to become a writer and his discovery of what it means to be a gay man. His witty, conversational narrative transports us from the 1960s to the near present, from starkly erotic scenes in the back rooms of New York clubs to episodes of rarefied hilarity in the salons of Paris to moments of family truth in the American Midwest. Along the way, a breathtaking variety of personal connections--and near misses--slowly builds an awareness of the transformative power of genuine friendship, of love and loss, culminating in an indelible experience with a dying man. And as the flow of memory carries us across time, space and society, one man's magnificently realized story grows to encompass an entire generation. Sublimely funny yet elegiac, full of unsparingly trenchant social observation yet infused with wisdom and a deeply felt compassion, The Farewell Symphony is a triumph of reflection and expressive elegance. It is also a stunning and wholly original panorama of gay life over the past thirty years--the crowning achievement of one of our finest writers.

What happens when one of our most celebrated writers combines talents with a French artist and architect to capture life in their Parisian neighborhood? The result is a lighthearted, gently satiric portrait of the heart of Paris -- including the Marais, Les Halles, the two islands in the Seine, and the Châtelet -- and the people who call it home. It is an enchantingly varied world, populated not only by dazzling literati and ultrachic couturiers and art dealers but also by poetic shopkeepers, grandmotherly prostitutes, and, ever underfoot, an irrepressible basset hound named Fred. The foibles and eccentricities of these sometimes outrageous, always memorable individuals are brought to life with unfailing wit and affection. Below the surface of the sparkling humor in Our Paris, there is a tragic undercurrent. While Hubert Sorin was completing this work, he was nearing the end of his struggle with AIDS. The book is a tribute to the loving spirit with which the authors banished somberness and celebrated the pleasures of their life together.--JACKET.

Imagines the relationship between Gore Vidal, the author, and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, while McVeigh sits on death row.