Vintage International
7 total works
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
"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
In his two most celebrated novels, A BOY'S OWN STORY and THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY, Edmund White charted the story of an American homosexual through the 1960s and 1970s. They received huge acclaim, and the third in the sequence - which covers the 80s - is long-awaited. In THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY Edmund White has drwan together all his experience of gay life in the 80's - sexual adventure, cultural explosion, travel, gossip, the political shifts of the time, love - and transformed them into a wonderfully witty and moving chronicle. Set in Europe and the US, and including portraits (thinly disguised) of some of the key figures of the time. THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY opens up a world which feels painfully and fascinatingly real. This novel will be a major literary event.
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.
"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World
"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World
The eight stories in this erotic and heartbreaking collection are barometers of difference. They measure the distance between an American expatriate and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and rough sex; the gulf between a man dying of AIDS and his uncomprehending relatives.
Combining glittering wit, an atmosphere dense in social paranoia, and a breathtaking elegance and precision of language, White's first novel suggests a hilarious apotheosis of the comedy of manners. For, on the privileged island community where Forgetting Elena takes place, manners are everything. Or so it seems to White's excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one's bathroom habits to the composition of "spontaneous" poetry is subject to rigid conventions.
A middle-aged American works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young french architect with a gleam in his eye. Nothing will come of this, thinks Austin, wary and on the rebound from a bruising affair. Yet slowly, to his amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance. As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, all they have to deal with are comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, to the shutterered squares of Venice, to Key West in the sun, Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end, to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara. THE MARRIED MAN is alive with wit, full of extraordinary characters and electric sexuality. But above all, it is a love story. Haunting, aching, stripped of sentiment, it carries the reader - like Austin himself- into untravelled countries, over the rim of love and loss.
This book brings together some of Edmund White's essays, articles and reviews from more than 20 years, and presents a portrait of the writer and his time. The book features interviews, profiles and essays which focus on the literary and cultural figures whose work has most influenced White: Nabokov, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tennesse Williams, Michel Foucault, Pasoline, Roland Barthes, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote and Marguerite Yourcenar. Interweaved with these are a series of articles which illuminate Edmund White's response to the political dimensions of homosexual life - a response that centres on the importance of friendship when AIDS enters the scene.