White - Caracole

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY

When the narrator of Whites 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. Yet even as he launches himself into the arena of homosexual eros, Whites protagonist is also finding his way into the larger world. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprisingand populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrinkThe Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75540-1

THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY

In The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White creates a novel of opulent sensuality and manifold sorrows that is at once the story of a writers education and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present. Whites narrator is that worlds survivor and its eulogist. As he marks the six-month anniversary of his lovers death from AIDS, he leads the reader back on a thirty-year journey of memory and desire. From the 1960s to the 1990s, from Parisian salons to the dunes of Fire Island, and from evenings of brilliant conversation to nights of unfettered sex in the basement clubs of the West Village, The Farewell Symphony commemorates lust and friendship, the beautiful dead and their prematurely aged mourners.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75476-3

THE BURNING LIBRARY

Twenty-five years of Edmund Whites nonfiction writings are collected in this volume of exhilarating wit, acuity, and candora book that is at once a living record of the authors intellectual development and a chronicle of gay politics, sexuality, literature, and culture from Stonewall to the age of AIDS. The Burning Library includes such groundbreaking essays as The Gay Philosopher, Sexual Culture, Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf, and The Personal Is Political: Queer Fiction and Criticismworks that redefine sexuality, identity, and friendship in the light of gay experience and desire. Alongside them are brilliantly subversive appreciations of cultural icons as diverse as Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer formerly known as Prince. The resulting volume confirms Whites reputation as a thinker of formidable intelligence and prophetic audacity.

Gay Studies/Essays/978-0-679-75474-9

CARACOLE

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 navet and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76416-8

FORGETTING ELENA

Forgetting Elena takes place on a privileged island community where manners are everything. Or so it seems to Whites excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator, who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from ones bathroom habits to the composition of spontaneous poetry is subject to rigid conventions. But no sooner has he begun to intuit the islandss Byzantine codes than the mysterious and charismatic Elena is urging him to transgress them, with results that are at once shocking and wickedly funny.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75573-9

GENET

Bastard, thief, prostitute, jailbird, Jean Genet was one of French literatures sacred monsters. In works from Our Lady of the Flowers to The Screens, he created scandalous personal mythology while savaging the conventions of his society. His career was a series of calculated shocks marked by feuds, rootlessness, and the embrace of unpopular causes and outcast peoples. Now this most enigmatic of writers has found his ideal biographer in novelist Edmund White, whose eloquent and often poignant chronicle does justice to the unruly narrative of Genets life even as it maps the various worlds in which he lived and the perverse landscape of his imagination.

Biography/978-0-679-75479-4

THE MARRIED MAN

Austin Smith is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. He is pushing fifty, loveless, drifting. One day at the gym he meets Julien: French, an architect, much younger, and married. Against every expectation, this chance acquaintance matures into a relationship of uncommon intensity. In the beginning, the lovers only impediments are the easily surmountable and comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. With increasing desperation, in a quest to save health and happiness, they move from the shuttered squares of Venice to sun-drenched Key West, to Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78144-8

SKINNED ALIVE

In Skinned Alive, Edmund White measures the distance between an expatriate American and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and hard sex; the gulf that separates a man dying of AIDS from his uncomprehending Texas relatives; and the inequality between a young playwright and the coquettish actor who is the object of his adoration. Beautifully written, uncannily observant, and by turns funny, erotic, and heartbreaking, these nine stories are brilliant shards of sensibility and experience, fashioned by one of the finest writers of our time.