Edmund White

At home, in school, and on the streets, a homosexual teenager growing up in the 1950s moves through comic sexual experiments, isolation, fear, and exciting expectations toward an escape from childhood and a firm sense of self, in this classic coming-of-age novel. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A Boy's Own Story

A Previous Life

Bloomsbury is proud to announce the first title in an occasional series in which some of the world's finest novelists reveal the secrets of the city they know best. These beautifully produced, pocket-sized books will provide exactly what is missing in ordinary travel guides: insights and imagination that lead the reader into those parts of a city no other guide can reach. A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. Entering the Marais evokes the history of Jews in France, just as a visit to the Haynes Grill recalls the presence-festive, troubled-of black Americans in Paris for a century and a half. Gays, Decadents, even Royalists past and present are all subjected to the flaneur's scrutiny. Edmund White's The Flaneur is opinionated, personal, subjective. As he conducts us through the bookshops and boutiques, past the monuments and palaces, filling us in on the gossip and background of each site, he allows us to see through the blank walls and past the proud edifices and to glimpse the inner, human drama. Along the way he recounts everything from the latest debates among French law-makers to the juicy details of Colette's life in the Palais Royal, even summoning up the hothouse atmosphere of Gustave Moreau's atelier.

The Flaneur

A young gay man experiences the pain of growing out of adolescence and struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality and his desire for power as society moves from the constrained 1950s to the expressive 1960s. Reprint.

The Beautiful Room is Empty

"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 harbor 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 Jericó, 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 marvelous 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."--Provided by publisher.

A Saint from Texas

Humble Lover

The newest novel from virtuosic writer Edmund White about the perils of beauty; a funny, sexy account of gay life in New York City during the 1970s and '80s.

Our Young Man

No one has been more frank, lucid, rueful and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, starting with A Boy's Own Story, White here takes fiction out of his story and delivers the facts of his life in all their shocking and absorbing verity. From an adolescence in the 1950s, an era that tried to "cure his homosexuality" but found him "unsalvageable," he emerged into a 1960s society that redesignated his orientation as "acceptable (nearly)." He describes a life touched by psychotherapy in every decade, starting with his flamboyant and demanding therapist mother, who considered him her own personal test case -- and personal escort to cocktail lounges after her divorce. His father thought that even wearing a wristwatch was effeminate, though custodial visits to Dad in Cincinnati inadvertently initiated White into the culture of "hustlers and johns" that changed his life. In My Lives, White shares his enthusiasms and his passions -- for Paris, for London, for Jean Genet -- and introduces us to his lovers and predilections, past and present. "Now that I'm sixty-five," writes White, "I think this is a good moment to write a memoir. . . . Sixty-five is the right time for casting a backward glance, while one is still fully engaged in one's life."

An Autobiography

My Lives

The narrator tries to identify and understand the elaborate manners of a wealthy island community, but just as he begins to understand them, Elena tries to convince him to break with convention

Forgetting Elena

A fictional account of one man's struggle to succeed as a writer and to discover what it means to be gay offers a journey of remembrance that ranges from the 1960s to the present day. By the author of A Boy's Own Story. 30,000 first printing.

The Farewell Symphony

Traces the life of controversial French writer Jean Genet, analyzes his novels and plays, and discusses the major themes of his work. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

A Biography

Genet

An intensely haunting and poetic evocation of lost love, comprised of chapters that are nocturnes set in different emotional keys but interconnected through subtle modulations, draws upon the worlds of religious mysticism, cafe society, homosexual love, and surrealism

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

Profiles Proust beyond his reclusive and obsessive persona, as a lonely young boy, darling of Parisian salons, fame seeker, and troubled homosexual. By the award-winning author of Genet: a Biography. 20,000 first printing.

A Penguin Lives Biography

Marcel Proust

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 Enferand 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.

The Double Life of a Rebel

Rimbaud

Previous Life

Linda Coverdale

Herve Guibert

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Ada Öyküleri

The celebrated author of The Flâneur traces his relocation to 1983 Paris in spite of his unfamiliarity with the language and culture, tracing how he established intimate, intellectual relationships with the city and new friends while advancing his literary career.

My Years in Paris

Inside a Pearl

In the New Y ork 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. I t's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.

My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s

City Boy

Romantic sparks fly when a lonely fiftysomething American furniture scholar falls in love with a married woman much younger than himself. By the author of The Farewell Symphony. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Edmund White

About

Books

Join the club