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

‘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.

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.

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

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

______________ ‘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

______________‘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.

‘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.

______________'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