Edmund White – författare

***A TIMES/SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025***'All the no-holds-barred candour you'd expect . . . A hoot, and surprisingly touching' THE TIMES, BOOKS OF THE YEAR'Trousers down from page one ... NSFW' THE TIMES'The gayest book ever written' HENRY HOKE, author of Open Throat'Daddy's diary fully delivers' JEREMY ATHERTON LIN, author of Gay Bar--------------------------------------------With his trademark wit, candour and relentlessly perceptive eye, Edmund White, the beloved 85-year-old ‘paterfamilias of queer literature’ (New York Times) delves unflinchingly into the aspect of his life which has inspired so many of his masterpieces: sex.Documenting everything from covert fumblings in the repressed American Midwest of the 1950’s to the Arcadian gay debauchery of New York in the 1970’s; through the terror of HIV and the age of sex on the apps, White has seen – and experienced – it all.Unyieldingly honest, outrageously raucous and arrestingly touching, The Loves of My Life can but further cement White’s unquestionable role at the apex of the gay canon.--------------------------------------------'A pointillistic canvas of gay desire and male sexuality' RALF WEBB, GUARDIAN'Juicy, ebullient and ecstatic' OBSERVER'Wry, hilarious, moving and brilliantly unreserved' SEÁN HEWITT, author of Open, Heaven

»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 DAGBLADETEdmund 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 Boy s 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

______________‘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.

A Boy's Own Story traces an unnamed narrator's coming-of-age during the 1950s.It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party.Beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, the unnamed narrator struggles with his sexuality, seeking consolation in art and literature, and in his own fantastic imagination as he fills his head with romantic expectations.The result is a book of exquisite poignancy and humour that moves towards a conclusion which will allow the boy to leave behind his childhood forever.'Edmund White has crossed The Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis, J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel' – New York TimesPart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

*WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ALEXANDER CHEE*'A stylish, deftly erudite and enormously diverting book’ - Sunday Telegraph‘An artfully aimless pleasure cruise around Paris’ - Guardian'White's genius as a flâneur is revealed in his affinity for unexpected pleasures, and he includes many for our delectation' - New Yorker______________A unique and eclectic view of Paris through the eyes of a fierce and witty intellect.A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the streets he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.Acclaimed writer Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the avenues and along the quays, into parts of the city virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many locals, luring the reader into the fascinating and seductive backstreets of his personal Paris.______________'One has the impression 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 . . . White tells such a good story that I'm ready to listen to anything he wants to talk about' - New York Times Book 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.

‘Poignant and challenging...A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound’ Daily TelegraphAustin Smith, 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. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance. As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, they deal with 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, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara where their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF A BOY'S OWN STORY AND THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY'A superb introduction to the great novelist and playwright, vagabond, thief and convict, and to the brutal childhood from which he mined his remarkable vision' J G Ballard, Books of the Year, Sunday TimesInterviewing lovers, friends, publishers and acquaintances, Edmund White draws from material, letters (a number published here for the first time) and other original sources to explore the perverse extremes of Jean Genet's life and writing. Separating the fact from the mythology which was fostered by Genet himself, White's portrait is a deftly painted celebration of French Literature's most modern rogue.

When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. This book is 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. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and 18 others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent - James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz - but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. ""Loss Within Loss"" spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects. This text is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. ""Loss Within Loss"" stands as a reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as a survey of that devastation.

States of Desire Revisited looks back from the twenty-first century at a pivotal moment in the late 1970s: Gay Liberation was a new and flourishing movement of creative culture, political activism, and sexual freedom, just before the 1980s devastation of AIDS. Edmund White traveled America, recording impressions of gay individuals and communities that remain perceptive and captivating today. He noted politicos in D.C. working the system, in-fighting radicals in New York and San Francisco, butch guys in Houston and self-loathing but courteous gentlemen in Memphis, the ""Fifties in Deep Freeze"" in Kansas City, progressive thinkers with conservative style in Minneapolis and Portland, wealth and beauty in Los Angeles, and, in Santa Fe, a desert retreat for older gays and lesbians since the 1920s.White frames those past travels with a brief, bracing review of gay America since the 1970s (""now we were all supposed to settle down with a partner in the suburbs and adopt a Korean daughter""), and a reflection on how Internet culture has diminished unique gay places and scenes but brought isolated individuals into a global GLBTQ community.

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

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.

In Edmund White''s most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair. 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 this revelatory biography of Jean Genet, we have the first full-scale life of one of the great -- and controversial -- figures of twentieth-century literature. Edmund White shows us the writer in all his permutations: poet, dandy, homosexual, thief; a ''thug of genius'', as Simone de Beauvoir called him.Moving from Genet''s illegitimate birth in 1910 to his foster childhood in a farming village in central France, Edmund White explores the early milieu that transformed an inherently theatrical child into a petty criminal and prodigiously original writer, whose most startling creation may have been his invention of himself. Accused of stealing and running away, Genet was sent to reform school at Mettray, where his imagination flourished under the spell of an all-male communal life and his first homosexual experiences. In the 1930s, he deserted from the army and travelled in Europe as a vagabond, prostitute and thief, always on the lam from the police and the military. In 1942, he emerged from one of several prison stays with the first of his remarkable novels, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was admired by Cocteau, who undertook to get it published and interceded with the French authorities to keep its author out of prison. White shows us how Cocteau thrust the ''marvelous, mysterious, intolerable'' Genet into the heart of literary Paris, where he enjoyed a curious celebrity as great writer and petty thief, was painted by Giacometti (from whom he stole) and was canonized by Sartre in his monumental study, Saint Genet.By 1948, Genet had produced five highly original novels. In the mid-1950s, after several years of debilitating depression, he turned to the writing of plays, of which The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens were immediately hailed as masterpieces. Despite his ambivalence about political movements, he supported the Paris student uprising in 1968 and turned up -- as a journalist -- at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In 1970, he became a spokesman for the Black Panthers, but in his last decade he immersed himself -- politically and aesthetically -- in the Arab world, championing the struggle for a Palestinian homeland and writing his last, posthumously published book, Prisoner of Love.Edmund White explores the perverse extremes of Genet''s life and separates the facts from the mythology that Genet himself fashioned. Drawing on interviews with Genet''s friends, lovers, publishers and acquaintances, and using new material from correspondence, journals, police records, psychiatric reports and other original sources, White reveals a life animated by contradictory impulses: authenticity and dissembling, fidelity and flirtation, domination and submission, honor and betrayal. Throughout, he brilliantly interprets and appraises Genet''s astonishing oeuvre, reading the fiction with the focussed attention of a novelist and opening up the dense invention of the plays. His masterful and intuitive biography fully illuminates a hitherto enigmatic literary genius.

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.

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

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.

Along with his groundbreaking essays that redefine politics, language, identity, and friendship in the light of gay experience and desire, this magisterial collection of 25 years 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. Reading tour.

Edmund White’s charming, funny, telling series of vignettes of the Paris neighborhood where he and his lover, French architect and illustrator Hubert Sorin, lived. In this ode to Pairs, the everyday becomes extraordinary with White’s observations accompanied by Sorin’s illustrations. With characters like Father Pierre Riches, the “kind and elegant” catholic priest whose hair had been stroked by Cavafy, to Billy Boy, the jewelry designer with 16,000 Barbies, there is delightful eccentricity to this collaboration. Written during Sorin’s decline to AIDS, Our Paris is a poignant look at the couple and the city they loved.From the Hardcover edition.

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.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 forgotten figures who were pivotal in the movement, such as Lee Brewster, head of the Queens Liberation Front, and Ernestine Eckstine, 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.

Drama/ 2m A famous author comes face-to-face with America's most notorious terrorist. One has a story to write, the other has a story to tell. As the clock ticks on death row, a strange bond grows between the two men. Filled with clever sparring and raw emotion, this is a tuat drama that touches on the definitions of freedom and the need for love. The Daily Telegraph in London hailed Terre Haute as, "topical, transgressive and thrillingly dramatic." "White has captured the amusingly constricted voices of the patrician novelist and the plebian terrorist cannily and cogently." -Charles Isherwood, The New York Times "...provides us a concise and haunting retelling of the facts, plus an imaginative and realistic creation of 'what could have been'." -broadwayworld.com