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Reading lists

Books to read to learn more about the AIDS crisis

The Married Man

A searingly honest love story told in White’s characteristically beautiful, heart-breaking prose.

Written with the characteristic brilliance and the particular flair for poetic detail that so distinguishes his books, Edmund White's new novel is arguably his best to date... Heartbreakingly beautiful prose, so elegantly achieved it has the ring of a master...marvellously life-affirming... In short, nothing less than brilliant

Undoubtedly one of his best novels. The prose is lyrical...writing that is truly supple, adapting itself to comedy or tragedy as required

The Married Man is Edmund White at his quintessential best

Poignant and challenging... Candid and often painfully personal... A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical sequence A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Noctunes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about America - States of Desire - and of Sketches from Memory, with Hubert Sorin. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

‘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 Telegraph 
 
Austin 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.

Edmund White

Edmund White has done a scrupulous job in uncovering the truth-His best achievement is to analyse and evaluate Genet's contribution to literature and to clarify his originality. He points up his inspired verbal invention and dense, impacted prose with many a felicitous quotation. This biography is elegant meticulous and wholly satisfying

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

'White's Genet is well written and clearly argues throughout-As an orthodox monument to an unorthodox man, Genet is unlikely to be surpassed' Guardian

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 Times 
 
Interviewing 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.

Edmund White

Books by Edmund White

Articles featuring Edmund White

Books to read to learn more about the AIDS crisis

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