A flaneur 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.
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 Dali 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.
Edmund 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.
au milieu du xixe siècle, l'anglaise frances trollope fut l'une des premières femmes à dénoncer dans ses livres les dérives d'une jeune nation bientôt destinée à diriger le monde, les etats-unis.
ce pays, elle ne l'aurait sans doute jamais découvert sans fanny wright, sa compagne de voyage, aventurière
intrépide et féministe engagée. ensemble, elles ont parcouru ce continent vierge et à peine civilisé, aux moeurs si éloignées de leur culture britannique. au fil de ce récit de voyage, d'amour et d'aventure se dessine alors en filigrane le portrait d'un pays qui, deux siècles plus tard, n'a pas guéri tous ses maux.
C'est un court portrait de Rimbaud qui nous est offert ici sous la plume intimiste du grand romancier et essayiste américain, Edmund White, qui a longtemps vécu à Paris.
S'il s'attache particulièrement à la relation de son personnage avec Verlaine, il explore aussi l'écriture rimbaldienne pour mettre en lumière l'univers de celui qui a "inventé l'obscurité en poésie".
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
En 1900, à vingt-huit ans à peine, le grand écrivain américain Stephen Crane se meurt de la tuberculose au fin fond de la campagne anglaise. Sa compagne, Cora, ancienne prostituée et tenancière du bordel appelé « Hotel de Dream », en Floride, remue ciel et terre pour trouver l'argent qui permettra de conduire Crane jusqu'à la clinique, au coeur de la Forêt-Noire, où elle pense qu'il pourra être guéri. Au cours de ce long et pénible exode vers l'Allemagne ponctué par les visites de Joseph Conrad et Henry James, Crane lui dicte son nouveau roman, chapitre par chapitre.
Intitulé Le Garçon maquillé, ce « roman dans le roman » raconte l'histoire d'un adolescent, Elliott, rencontré par Crane autrefois dans les rues de New York et vivant de la prostitution. Un banquier marié et petit-bourgeois, foudroyé par sa beauté, est saisi d'une passion dévorante pour le jeune homme. Mais la ruine, le désastre et la tragédie guettent à la fois le garçon et le banquier...
Edmund White réussit ici un remarquable tour de force littéraire. Un texte qui explore la vie sordide du New York de la fin du XIXe siècle tout en proposant l'admirable portrait d'une femme amoureuse d'un écrivain de génie. Un roman surprenant, humain et subtil.
Jack Holmes et Will Wright débarquent à New York dans les années 1960. Collègues dans un journal culturel, ils deviennent amis. C'est même Jack qui présente Will à sa future femme. Mais c'est une amitié compliquée : Jack est amoureux de Will. Perturbé par ses désirs, Jack consulte un psychiatre et sort avec des femmes, tout en continuant à avoir des liaisons furtives avec des hommes. Et pourtant, au fil des trente années que durera leur amitié, de la libération homosexuelle jusqu'à la catastrophe du sida, Jack demeurera toujours dévoué à Will. Et les deux hommes, à défaut d'en jouir ensemble, partageront un même goût pour le libertinage dans une ville en pleine libération elle aussi.
White nous dévoile ici, sans fard, tous les faits de sa vie, même les plus provocants, comme seul un grand écrivain peut se le permettre. Mes vies est un festin spectaculaire, charmant et drôle, charnel et intelligent, outrageux et lumineux. Tour à tour, décapant, émouvant, sensible, Edmund White nous embarque dans ses univers et dans ses opinions sur l'art et la vie. « Mes psys », « Mes femmes », «Ma mère », « Mes tapins », « Mes amis », « Mon Europe », « Mon Genet »... sont autant de chapitres qui constituent ces mémoires à l'écriture ciselée et d'une mélancolie déchirante.
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.
"Aux États-Unis comme en France, Edmund White s'impose comme un théoricien de la littérature gay et un mémorialiste de la génération sida. Il faut l'écouter se remémorer ses rencontres, de Michel Foucault à Robert Mapplethorpe, de -Truman Capote à Vladimir -Nabokov, de -Christopher -Isherwood à Susan Sontag. -Souvent, à la douleur de l'absence se mêle le plaisir d'un souvenir qui surgit - car sa mémoire est presque infaillible. Dans la voix et l'écriture d'Edmund White, "le plus français des écrivains américains", il y a la couleur du passé, le sourire d'une anecdote étonnante, le souffle de l'histoire."Augustin Trapenard
B>With an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst./b>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.A Boy's Own Story traces an unnamed narrator's coming-of-age during the 1950s. Beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relentless mocking from his peers, the boy 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.Originally published in 1982 as the first of Edmund White's trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story became an instant classic for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality. Lyrical and powerfully evocative, this is an American literary treasure.
From legendary writer 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 grander fates. Just as an untold fortune of oil lies beneath their daddy's land, both girls harbour 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 Jerico, 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 marvellous 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 pretention of the Paris gratin and the strict piety of a Colombian convent.
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.
'I find it impossible to imagine anyone better read than White . Wisdom and a certain kind of tenderness are to be found on every page' Observer Edmund White made his name as a writer, but he remembers his life through the books he read. For White, each momentous occasion came with books to match: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality; 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.
White's 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. Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a sensitive, smart account of a life in literature.
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, the bond between the two men grows.
Terre Haute is inspired by Gore Vidal's famous essays on Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. A scorching new play by one of America's greatest living writers, it premiered to critical acclaim at the Edinbrugh Fringe Festival in August 2006, before touring the UK in spring 2007.
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.
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
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.
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.
Edmund 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.
