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| photo: Andrew Fladeboe | |
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, Our Young Man and most recently A Saint from Texas (Bloomsbury, August 4, 2020). His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the National Book Foundation's 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
On your nightstand now:
Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories. Her late story "Mysterious Kor" is glorious.
During the pandemic, I've been Skyping every day with Yiyun Li; we're reading books together. We just finished Rebecca West's The Birds Fell Down.
Favorite book when you were a child:
A book that a friend gave me in second grade about the lost dauphin that I've never been able to identify.
Your top five authors:
Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Colette, Proust and Alan Hollinghurst
Book you've faked reading:
The Faerie Queene
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Book you're an evangelist for:
Henry Green's Nothing
Book you've bought for the cover:
Anything in the Pléiade
Book you hid from your parents:
All books from my father. If he caught me reading, he'd give me a chore to do.
Book that changed your life:
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I was 14 and lonely as hell in our Michigan summer house and chanced upon this book, which showed me it was okay--or at least possible--to be gay.
Favorite line from a book:
"There are people who would never have been in love, had they never heard love spoken of." --La Rochefoucauld's Maxims
Five books you'll never part with:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank
Nothing by Henry Green
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The stories in Joy Williams's Honored Guest.