Edmund White

______________‘Paris may well be White’s pearl, but he is in fact the real pearl ... This wonderfully eccentric, conversational and personalised cultural history contains the essence of Edmund White … Entertaining and wry, White is worldly-wise and wise’ - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times‘Edmund White writing about his Paris years, with walk-on parts for Catherine Deneuve, Yves Saint-Laurent and other assorted members of the French glitterati? That’d be Inside a Pearl’ – Scotsman‘We are lucky to have him still publishing … diverting, affectionate … and full of tips’ - London Evening Standard______________A literary treat of a memoir, covering Edmund White's years among the cultural and intellectual elite of 1980s ParisEdmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. White fell passionately in love with Paris, its beauty in the half-light and eternal mists; its serenity compared with the New York he had known. Intoxicated and intellectually stimulated by its culture, he became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet, wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. Frequent trips across the Channel to literary parties in London begot friendships with Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis and many others. When he left, fifteen years later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves St Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through whom he’d come to a deeper understanding of French life. Inside a Pearl vividly recalls those fertile years, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U. S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he'd made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he'd come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way. The book's title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It's a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

»En roman med ett underbart bildspråk, fylld med glasklara insikter.« | AASE BERG, DN »Får Jonas Gardells uppväxtskildringar att framstå som mellanmjölkiga i jämförelse.« | THERESE ERIKSSON, SVENSKA DAGBLADET Edmund Whites självbiografiska roman En pojkes egen historia blev en omedelbar modern klassiker i USA när den kom ut 1982. Romanen berättar om en pojke som upptäcker sin homosexualitet på fyrtio- och femtiotalet. När han är femton har han sex med en tolvårig kamrat. Det är en troskyldig lek, ännu ostörd av det självhat som ska komma att prägla den växande medvetenheten om vad ordet »homosexuell« betyder där de lever. I takt med att pojken blir vuxen försöker han sig på heterosexuell kärlek, buddhism och psykoanalys, för att bli »frisk«. Han kommer också att ange en man han älskar en äldre lärare och älskare som han anmäler för skolmyndigheterna för att passa in i den totalitära kultur som omger honom. I översättning av Thomas Preis och med ett nyskrivet förord av Stefan Ingvarsson. EDMUND WHITE [f. 1940 i Ohio] är en amerikansk romanförfattare och essäist. Genombrottet i USA kom med den dokumentära The Joy of Gay Sex [1977], skriven tillsammans med Charles Silverstein. Hans internationella rykte etablerades med den självbiografiska romantrilogin A Boys Own Story [1982], The Beautiful Room Is Empty [1988] och The Farewell Symphony [1997]. Edmund White har även skrivit inflytelserika böcker om Jean Genet och Marcel Proust. »White drar de litterära konsekvenserna ur sitt unga berättarjags utanförskap med sådan psykologisk fingertoppskänsla att det räcker att någon gång ha varit tonåring - av valfritt kön och sexuell orientering - för att kunna relatera till detta ingenmansland mellan upplevda och utlevda känslor.« | NIKLAS QVARNSTRÖM, EXPRESSEN »White skriver snyggt och intelligent... En lysande stilist.« | BJÖRN KOHLSTRÖM, BERNUR

______________‘This comedy of sexual manners may be White's finest novel’ - Sunday Times‘An elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships’ - New Yorker‘Marks White out as an immensely gifted chronicler of the intricacies of the human heart’ - Alex Clark, Guardian______________Jack Holmes is suffering from unrequited love. It doesn't look as if there will ever be anyone else he falls for: the other men he takes to bed never stay for long. Jack's friend Will Wright comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer and, like Jack, works on the Northern Review. Jack will introduce Will to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry, but is discreet about his own adventures in love - for this is sixties New York, literary and intense, before gay liberation; a concoction of old society, bohemians rich and poor, sleek European immigrants and transplanted Midwesterners. Against this charged backdrop, the different lives of Jack and Will intertwine, and as their loves come and go, they will always be, at the very least, friends.

Title: Street Nomenclature. A new and simple plan for preventing the inconvience resulting from the number of streets ... of the same name in London, etc. Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. The HISTORY OF BRITAIN & IRELAND collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. As well as historical works, this collection includes geographies, travelogues, and titles covering periods of competition and cooperation among the people of Great Britain and Ireland. Works also explore the countries' relations with France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Scandinavia. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library White, Edmund; 1858. 8 . 10351.d.16.

______________‘An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s ... it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail’ - New York Times‘Energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies ... an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes’ - Harper's Bazaar‘At once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip’ - John Irving______________In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy's Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White's years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. It's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.

______________ ‘One of the best writers of my generation’ - John Irving ‘One of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language' - Dave Eggers ______________ What happens when a life implodes? When a respected older man, a product of the liberated 1970s, is incapable of cleaning up his act for the twenty-first century? When he pursues sex with a rabidity his body and his reputation can no longer sustain? In this collection, which features two new, previously unpublished stories, Edmund White explores different aspects of ageing, romance and sex. Taking an unsparing look at gay midlife, these stories are not fiction devoted to the dim splendours and miseries of the past but rather to the unsettling, irresistible claims of the present. Age remains one of the great taboos of gay culture, but Edmund White, as iconoclastic as ever, writes about maturity with the same precision and insight he brought to adolescence in A Boy's Own Story. Edmund White has always been the ideal travelling companion, as he demonstrated in The Flaneur; here, he invites the reader to accompany him to Florida, the Greek Isles, and Turkey - and into the chaotic gay demimonde of contemporary New York. ______________ Praise for My Lives: 'A vital and engrossing book. He has a luxuriantly observant memory, and his past is evoked with keen feeling as well as a pervasive self-deprecating wit. His account of himself is clear, humorous, never coy' - Allan Hollinghurst, Guardian

Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) died young but his extraordinary poetry continues to influence and inspire - fans include Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith. His long poem Un Saison en Enfer and his collection Illuminations are central to the modern canon. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while gun-running in Africa. He was thirty-seven. Distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brilliantly explores the young poet's relationships with his family and his teachers, as well as his notorious affair with the older and more established poet Paul Verlaine. He reveals the longing for a utopian life of the future and the sexual taboos that haunt Rimbaud's works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to this great and mercurial poet.

______________ 'Eccentric, disgracefully funny and shockingly beautiful by turns; determined both to describe the world as it really is and to invent it anew' - Guardian 'Powerful ... full of telling period detail and couched in White's customary honeyed prose ... This is a tender and moving book worthy of its distinguished protagonist' - Daily Mail 'The masterfully multi-layered Hotel de Dream is an illuminating commentary on storytelling' - Financial Times 'White's imaginative recreations of Crane's work provide the novel's best passages ... his mimetic prose is marvellously convincing ... engrossing' - Sunday Times ______________ A moving, expertly crafted novel from one of New York's most prolific authors. The famed writer Stephen Crane is travelling to a German clinic in search of a cure for the tuberculosis that threatens his life. Knowing it may be his last chance, he dictates the story of 'The Painted Boy', inspired by a real-life encounter. But as the story delves into the seedy underworld of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Crane's health deteriorates and the outcome of the story becomes as critical as the author's life itself.

This title offers a unique and insightful contemplation of the leading figures of modern art and literature. The first paperback edition of this dazzling collection of profiles and interviews by one of the most prolific and important cultural essayists writing today. Bestselling novelist, memoirist and biographer Edmund White once again displays his razor-sharp wit and boundless erudition in thirty five portraits of the writers, artists and cultural icons who have captured his curiosity and imagination for the last twenty years. White is his usual compelling, yet unpretentious, self as he tells of his encounters with the icons of the age, including Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, David Geffen, Andre Michel Foucault, Andy Warhol, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Genet, Jasper Johns and Yves Saint Laurent. This is a thoughtful, learned and freshly insightful work, which is consistently conversational and accessible whether he is writing about the literary greats or about celebrities like Elton John.

______________ ‘He is such a good writer he deserves to be read by everyone' - Sunday Telegraph ‘Remarkable ... among the most heartbreaking accounts of family life I have ever read ... This is an astonishing and wonderfully well-written biography' - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday ‘Vital and engrossing ... we feel strongly, at the end of this remarkable book, that it is more than that: it is the source of everything, however artful and luscious, that he has ever written' - Alan Hollinghurst, Guardian ______________ A moving, hilarious, shocking and enlightening memoir from Edmund White. No one has ever been more frank, lucid, rueful and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, White takes the fiction out of his story and delivers the facts in all their shocking and absorbing verity. From an adolescence in the 1950s, an era that tried to ‘cure' homosexuality, he emerged into a 1960s society which re-designated his orientation as ‘acceptable (nearly)'. He describes a life touched by psychotherapy in every decade, starting with his flamboyant therapist mother who demanded that he be her own personal test case. In My Lives, White also shares his enthusiasm for England, his passion for Paris, and introduces us to his friends and lovers, past and present. His striking and eloquent opinions on art and life make this a spectacular read, by turns moving and hilarious, outrageous and enlightening.

An American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair. "Deeply moving... White rings new changes on the old themes of mortality and forgiveness."--The New York Times Book Review Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

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

From the National Book Award honored author of A Previous Life and a master of American literature comes a dazzling collection of 25 years of groundbreaking essays that redefined politics, language, identity, and friendship. "A testament to White's versatility, his insatiable curiosity about the emergence of gays in modern American life.... Fascinating." --San Francisco Chronicle Along with his essays of gay experience and desire, this magisterial collection of White's nonfiction writings includes dazzling subversive appreciations of cultural icons as diverse as Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer formerly known as Prince.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner - A meticulously researched biography of Jean Genet, one of France's most notorious writers. "Dazzling. Genet has found a scrupulous, meticulous chronicler in Edmund White." -- Philip Henscher, The Guardian 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.