Download or read book A Previous Life written by Edmund White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year." -Guardian "Intriguing and inventive." -Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year" "A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences." -Publishers Weekly, starred review _____________ A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love. Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White. Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds. Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.
Download or read book Inside a Pearl written by Edmund White and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary treat: a memoir of Edmund White's years among the cultural and intellectual elite of 1980s Paris
Download or read book A Saint from Texas written by Edmund White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Edmund White, a bold and sweeping new novel that traces the extraordinary fates of twin sisters, one destined for Parisian nobility and the other for Catholic sainthood. Yvette and Yvonne Crawford are twin sisters, born on a humble patch of East Texas prairie but bound for far more dramatic and tragic fates. Just as an untold fortune of oil lies beneath their daddy's land, both girls harbor their own secrets and dreams-ones that will carry them far from Texas and from each other. As the decades unfold, Yvonne will ascend the highest ranks of Parisian society as Yvette gives herself to a lifetime of worship and service in the streets of Jericó, Colombia. And yet, even as they remake themselves in their radically different lives, the twins find that the bonds of family and the past are unbreakable. Spanning the 1950s to the recent past, Edmund White's marvelous novel serves up an immensely pleasurable epic of two Texas women as their lives traverse varied worlds: the swaggering opulence of the Dallas nouveau riche, the airless pretension of the Paris gratin, and the strict piety of a Colombian convent. For nearly half a century, Edmund White's work has revitalized American literature, blithely breaking down boundaries of class and sexuality, and A Saint From Texas is one of his most joyous, gorgeously written, and piercing works to date.
Download or read book The Unpunished Vice written by Edmund White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new memoir from acclaimed author Edmund White about his life as a reader. Literary icon Edmund White made his name through his writing but remembers his life through the books he has read. For White, each momentous occasion came with a book to match: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality while he was at boarding school in Michigan; the Ezra Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of Stephen Crane that inspired one of White's novels. But it wasn't until heart surgery in 2014, when he temporarily lost his desire to read, that White realized the key role that reading played in his life: forming his tastes, shaping his memories, and amusing him through the best and worst life had to offer. Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a compendium of all the ways reading has shaped White's life and work. His larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's best-loved cultural figures. With characteristic wit and candor, he recalls reading Henry James to Peggy Guggenheim in her private gondola in Venice and phone calls at eight o'clock in the morning to Vladimir Nabokov--who once said that White was his favorite American writer. Featuring writing that has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Paris Review, among others, The Unpunished Vice is a wickedly smart and insightful account of a life in literature.
Download or read book Diary of a Foreigner in Paris written by Curzio Malaparte and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience postwar Europe through the diary of a fascinating and witty twentieth-century writer and artist. Recording his travels in France and Switzerland, Curzio Malaparte encounters famous figures such as Cocteau and Camus and captures the fraught, restless spirit of Paris after the trauma of war. In 1947 Curzio Malaparte returned to Paris for the first time in fourteen years. In between, he had been condemned by Mussolini to five years in exile and, on release, repeatedly imprisoned. In his intervals of freedom, he had been dispatched as a journalist to the Eastern Front, and though many of his reports from the bloodlands of Poland and Ukraine were censored, his experiences there became the basis for his unclassifiable postwar masterpiece and international bestseller, Kaputt. Now, returning to the one country that had always treated him well, the one country he had always loved, he was something of a star, albeit one that shines with a dusky and disturbing light. The journal he kept while in Paris records a range of meetings with remarkable people—Jean Cocteau and a dourly unwelcoming Albert Camus among them—and is full of Malaparte’s characteristically barbed reflections on the temper of the time. It is a perfect model of ambiguous reserve as well as humorous self-exposure. There is, for example, Malaparte’s curious custom of sitting out at night and barking along with the neighborhood dogs—dogs, after all, were his only friends when in exile. The French find it puzzling, to say the least; when it comes to Switzerland, it is grounds for prosecution!
Download or read book Loss Within Loss written by Edmund White and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. Published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, the 23 essays stand as a powerful reminder and survey of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community. The book also contains biographies of the subjects and the authors, as well as many bandw photographs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Stonewall Reader written by New York Public Library and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White. Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle Tor.com, Best Books of 2019 (So Far) Harper’s Bazaar, The 20 Best LGBTQ Books of 2019 The Advocate, The Best Queer(ish) Non-Fiction Tomes We Read in 2019 June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.
Download or read book A Boy s Own Story written by Edmund White and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young man struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality while coming of age in the 1950s.
Download or read book My Lives written by Edmund White and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one has been more frank, lucid, and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, starting with A Boy's Own Story, White here takes fiction out of his story and delivers the facts of his life in all their shocking and absorbing verity. In My Lives, White shares his enthusiasms and his passions, and he introduces us to his lovers and predilections.
Download or read book Fresh Men written by Edmund White and published by Running PressBook Pub. This book was released on 2004 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging collection of gay fiction presents twenty stories covering the pains of "coming out" and issues of identity, family drama, sex, love, and AIDS, presenting a broad palette of literary genres and approaches. Original.
Download or read book White Stone Day written by John MacLachlan Gray and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I mark this day most especially with a White Stone." ---Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll Edmund Whitty, a London newspaper correspondent who can usually be counted upon for crisp and lurid copy, has fallen upon lean times. After his triumphant exposé of a notorious serial killer, he has inexplicably lost his knack for sensational reporting. Broke and desperate, he seizes upon a generous offer from a mysterious American to discredit a quack psychic. But how, he ends up wondering uneasily, does the psychic know so much about a scandal involving Whitty's late brother? When the psychic is brutally murdered, Whitty finds himself accused of the crime and thrown into Milbank prison, the most bizarre institution of its kind in England. Help comes unexpectedly from "the Captain," a gangster not known for charity work. To save his own skin, Whitty must find the men responsible for the disappearance of the Captain's young niece, Eliza. Whitty's search takes him to Oxford, where he meets the brilliant and eccentric Reverend William Boltbyn, a renowned children's author who delights in playing croquet, devising elaborate stories, and taking artistic photographs of little girls. There he uncovers a looking-glass world, the dark side of Victoriana, and the murder of innocence. John MacLachlan Gray, who evoked "the mean streets and byways of 1852 London with a skill worthy of Dickens" (Publishers Weekly) in The Fiend in Human, spins an even more irresistible tale of dark secrets behind the facade of Victorian respectability in White Stone Day.
Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.
Download or read book Patriotic Gore written by Edmund Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1994 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.
Download or read book The Years written by Annie Ernaux and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008 The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns." Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize
Download or read book Our Young Man written by Edmund White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ______________ 'One of the best writers of my generation' - John Irving 'A playful yet searching novel of gay life in the New York of Ed Koch and Studio 54' - Kirkus 'Smart, worldly, erudite, well-connected, and funny' - New York Review of Books 'Remarkable ... America's most significant gay writer' - Literary Review ______________ 'Has everyone always been in love with you? Of course they have, who am I kidding? What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That's you, you're that beautiful. A thousand ships' New York City in the eighties, and at its decadent heart is Guy. The darling of Fire Island's gay community and one of New York's top male models, Guy is gliding his way to riches that are a world away from his modest provincial upbringing back home in France. Like some modern-day Dorian Gray he seems untouched by time: the decades pass, fashions change, yet his beauty remains as transcendent and captivating as ever. Such looks cannot help but bring him adoration. From sweet yet pathetic Fred to the wealthy and masochistic Baron, from the acerbic and cynical Pierre-Georges to Andre, fabricating Dalí fakes and hurtling towards prison and the abyss, all are in some way fixated on him. In return for the devotion and expensive gifts they lavish on him, he plays with unswerving loyalty whatever role they project onto him: unattainable idol, passionate lover, malleable client. But just as the years are catching up on his smooth skin and perfect body, so his way of life is closing in on him and destroying the men he loves. Edmund White has in Our Young Man created some of the richest representations of gay male identity, from the disco era to the age of AIDs. What links them all is the allure and enchantment they find in beauty. Revelling in its magic, Our Young Man nonetheless slips beneath the seductive surface to examine its dangerous depths, exploring its power to fascinate, enslave and deceive. Mesmerising, blackly comic, and delicately crafted, this is an exquisite novel from a contemporary master.
Download or read book The White Road written by Edmund de Waal and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined, collected, and coveted. Extraordinary new nonfiction, a gripping blend of history and memoir, by the author of the award-winning and bestselling international sensation, The Hare with the Amber Eyes. In The White Road, bestselling author and artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate narrative history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain, or "white gold." A potter who has been working with porcelain for more than forty years, de Waal describes how he set out on five journeys to places where porcelain was dreamed about, refined, collected and coveted-and that would help him understand the clay's mysterious allure. From his studio in London, he starts by travelling to three "white hills"-sites in China, Germany and England that are key to porcelain's creation. But his search eventually takes him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of twentieth-century history. Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft, and purity. In a sweeping yet intimate style that recalls The Hare with the Amber Eyes, de Waal gives us a singular understanding of "the spectrum of porcelain" and the mapping of desire.
Download or read book Prisoner of Love written by Jean Genet and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.
