Edmund White Books In Order

The Edmund Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. A Boy’s Own Story (1982)
  2. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
  3. The Farewell Symphony (1997)

Writer and the City Books In Publication Order

  1. The Flaneur (2001)
  2. Prague Pictures (By:John Banville) (2003)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Forgetting Elena (1973)
  2. Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
  3. Caracole (1985)
  4. The Married Man (2000)
  5. Fanny (2003)
  6. Hotel de Dream (2007)
  7. Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012)
  8. Our Young Man (2016)
  9. A Saint from Texas (2020)
  10. A Previous Life (2021)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. Terre Haute (2007)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1991)
  2. Skinned Alive (1995)
  3. Chaos (2007)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. States of Desire (1980)
  2. Genet (1993)
  3. The Burning Library (1994)
  4. Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1994)
  5. Marcel Proust (1999)
  6. City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (1999)
  7. Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (2000)
  8. Arts and Letters (2004)
  9. My Lives (2005)
  10. Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008)
  11. Sacred Monsters (2011)
  12. Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014)
  13. The Unpunished Vice (2018)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction (2004)
  2. The Proust Project (2004)

The Edmund Trilogy Book Covers

Writer and the City Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Edmund White Books Overview

A Boy’s Own Story

For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as America’s preeminent gay writer. He has a novelist s eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. He is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni versary of A Boy s Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents White s autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.A Boy s Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrator s coming of age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act. With A Boy s Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay…
can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one to one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

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 WorldFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

The Farewell Symphony

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.

The Flaneur

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.

Prague Pictures (By:John Banville)

The fourth book in Bloomsbury’s Writer and the City series. From one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern European experience, a panoramic view of a city that has seduced and bewitched visitors for centuries. Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, ‘devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art’, who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, and even the depredations of the tourist boom after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud, and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague’s often tragic history and portrays the people who made it: the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels. He also paints a portrait of the Prague of today, reveling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.

Forgetting Elena

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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

A hauntingly beautiful evocation of lost love, Noctunes for the King of Naples has all the startling, almost embarrassing, intimacy of a stranger’s love letters. The intense emotional situation envelops the readers from the first page; like all images in a dream, White’s characters are the most real people we know, thought they remain phantoms. Each chapter, each nocturne, is set in a different emotional key, but all are interconnected through such subtle modulations that the final effect is devastating.

Caracole

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 Na*zis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social na vet 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

The Married Man

Austin is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. He is pushing fifty, loveless, drifting. One day at the gym he meets Julien: French, an architect, much younger and married. Against every expectation, this chance acquaintance matures into profound romance. As the two men dash between bohemian suppers and sophisticated salons, their only impediments are the easily surmountable and comic clashes of culture, age and temperament. Inevitably, however, Julien’s past catches up with them. With increasing desperation, in a quest to save health and happiness, they move from the shuttered squares of Venice to sun drenched Key West, to Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis. Haunting and deeply moving, The Married Man carries the reader along with its protagonists into uncharted emotional territory, over the rim of love and loss. It is Edmund White’s finest novel.

Fanny

In her fifties, Mrs. Frances Trollope became famous overnight for her book attacking the United States. Twenty five years later, she sharpens her pen for her most controversial work yet the biography of her old friend, the radical and feminist Fanny Wright. She recalls the 1820s when the young Fanny erupted into the Trollopes’ sleepy English cottage like a volcano, her red hair flying, her talk aflame with utopian ideals. Before long, Wright has convinced Frances to follow her to America, a journey of extreme penury, frontier hardships, and the most satisfying sensual romance of Frances Trollope’s life. The biography soon degenerates into a settling of scores and digressions on the misadventures of Mrs. Trollope’s own family. By turns noble and petty, comic and tragic, it introduces us to literary lions, battling political theorists, gamblers and escaped slaves, and even the aging General Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. With hallucinatory realism, Mrs. Trollope paints French ch teaux, Belgian fogs, Mississippi mud, and the gaudy splendors and cruelties of Haiti. And throughout this sparkling narrative, we find love in all its forms in the family, between races and generations, and within the same sex. Fanny: A Fiction is a wonderful new departure for Edmund White a quirky, dazzling story of two extraordinary nineteenth century women, and a vibrant, questioning exploration of the nature of idealism, the clay feet of heroes, and the illusory power of the American dream.

Hotel de Dream

In a damp, old Sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty eight. The world famous author has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of an infamous Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream. In the midst of gathering tragedy, Crane begins dictating what will surely be his final work: a strange and poignant novel of a boy prostitute in 1890s New York and the married man who ruins his own life to win his love.

Jack Holmes and His Friend

Jack Holmes and Will Wright arrive in New York in the calm before the storm of the 1960s. Coworkers at a cultural journal, they soon become good friends. Jack even introduces Will to the woman he will marry. But their friendship is complicated: Jack is also in love with Will. Troubled by his subversive longings, Jack sees a psychiatrist and dates a few women, while also pursuing short lived liaisons with other men. But in the two decades of their friendship, from the first stirrings of gay liberation through the catastrophe of AIDS, Jack remains devoted to Will. And as Will embraces his heterosexual sensuality, nearly destroying his marriage, the two men share a newfound libertinism in a city that is itself embracing its freedom. Moving among beautifully delineated characters in a variety of social milieus, Edmund White brings narrative daring and an exquisite sense of life’s submerged drama to this masterful exploration of friendship, sexuality, and sensibility during a watershed moment in history.

Skinned Alive

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.

Chaos

When a respected older man clings to the values and mores of the liberated 1970s, when he pursues sex relentlessly and his reputation suffers, Chaos ensues. White explores different aspects of aging, romance, and sex, inviting his readers to come with him to Florida, the Greek Isles, and Turkey and into the chaotic gay demimonde of contemporary New York.

States of Desire

In this city by city description of the way homosexual men lived in the late seventies, Edmund White gives us a picture of Gay America that will surprise gay and straight readers alike. With great wit and humor, the co author of The Joy of Gay Sex tells what goes on behind the glittering surface of fashionable nightspots and glamorous resorts. But he also shows us gay engineers, gay computer experts, and gay cowboys; this is a look at a vast world never before documented. By introducing us to a wide variety of gay people, White gives us remarkable new insights into what it means to be gay in America. In States of Desire, you will meet a gay timber baron from Portland and a ‘big wig’ literally as well as figuratively in the Florida drag world. Here are: handsome lifeguards in Chicago those ‘bronzed demigods…
who lord it above us on their white wood towers’; a Hollywood host who has just spent ‘a typical L.A. day, driving 150 miles assembling the twelve ingredients for supper’; a San Franciscan who embraces his friends ‘with long, therapeutic hugs, silently searching their faces for the weather report of their subtlest, innermost feelings’; and Boston gay radicals, who defend some of the most controversial positions that concern society today. You will hear the stories of gay Cubans in Miami, a gay lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and even a self appointed gay Mormon prophet in Salt Lake City all narrated with a novelist’s fine ear for nuance. Into this vivid tapestry of people and places the author weaves the pros and cons of such issues as gay radicalism, the ‘urban gay renaissance’ and the much discussed gay penchant for hedonism and sexual extremism. Above all, White shows the remarkable possibilities for gay life today from the black gay ghettos of Atlanta to communes in New England; from ‘friendship networks’ in New York City to New Orleans style ‘uptown marriages’ in which men live with wife and children uptown and keep a boy in the Quarter; from Kansas City, where the self oppression of 1950s gay life still reigns supreme, to Fire Island’s unrivaled ‘spectacle of gay affluence and gay male beauty.’ For this eye opening book makes clear that gay life is every bit as rich and varied as the many gay lives the author so effectively describes.

Genet

In this revelatory biography of Jean Genet, we have the first full scale life of one of the great and controversial figures of twentieth century literature. Edmund White shows us the writer in all his permutations: poet, dandy, homosexual, thief; a ‘thug of genius’, as Simone de Beauvoir called him. Moving from Genet‘s illegitimate birth in 1910 to his foster childhood in a farming village in central France, Edmund White explores the early milieu that transformed an inherently theatrical child into a petty criminal and prodigiously original writer, whose most startling creation may have been his invention of himself. Accused of stealing and running away, Genet was sent to reform school at Mettray, where his imagination flourished under the spell of an all male communal life and his first homosexual experiences. In the 1930s, he deserted from the army and travelled in Europe as a vagabond, prostitute and thief, always on the lam from the police and the military. In 1942, he emerged from one of several prison stays with the first of his remarkable novels, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was admired by Cocteau, who undertook to get it published and interceded with the French authorities to keep its author out of prison. White shows us how Cocteau thrust the ‘marvelous, mysterious, intolerable’ Genet into the heart of literary Paris, where he enjoyed a curious celebrity as great writer and petty thief, was painted by Giacometti from whom he stole and was canonized by Sartre in his monumental study, Saint Genet. By 1948, Genet had produced five highly original novels. In the mid 1950s, after several years of debilitating depression, he turned to the writing of plays, of which The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens were immediately hailed as masterpieces. Despite his ambivalence about political movements, he supported the Paris student uprising in 1968 and turned up as a journalist at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In 1970, he became a spokesman for the Black Panthers, but in his last decade he immersed himself politically and aesthetically in the Arab world, championing the struggle for a Palestinian homeland and writing his last, posthumously published book, Prisoner of Love. Edmund White explores the perverse extremes of Genet‘s life and separates the facts from the mythology that Genet himself fashioned. Drawing on interviews with Genet‘s friends, lovers, publishers and acquaintances, and using new material from correspondence, journals, police records, psychiatric reports and other original sources, White reveals a life animated by contradictory impulses: authenticity and dissembling, fidelity and flirtation, domination and submission, honor and betrayal. Throughout, he brilliantly interprets and appraises Genet‘s astonishing oeuvre, reading the fiction with the focussed attention of a novelist and opening up the dense invention of the plays. His masterful and intuitive biography fully illuminates a hitherto enigmatic literary genius.

The Burning Library

Along with his groundbreaking essays that redefine politics, language, identity, and friendship in the light of gay experience and desire, this magisterial collection of 25 years of White’s nonfiction writings includes dazzling subversive appreciations of cultural icons as diverse as Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer formerly known as Prince. Reading tour.

Our Paris: Sketches from Memory

What happens when one of our most celebrated writers combines talents with a French artist and architect to capture life in their Parisian neighborhood? The result is a lighthearted, gently satiric portrait of the heart of Paris including the Marais, Les Halles, the two islands in the Seine, and the Ch telet and the people who call it home. It is an enchantingly varied world, populated not only by dazzling literati and ultrachic couturiers and art dealers but also by poetic shopkeepers, grandmotherly prostitutes, and, ever underfoot, an irrepressible basset hound named Fred. The foibles and eccentricities of these sometimes outrageous, always memorable individuals are brought to life with unfailing wit and affection. Below the surface of the sparkling humor in Our Paris, there is a tragic undercurrent. While Hubert Sorin was completing this work, he was nearing the end of his struggle with AIDS. The book is a tribute to the loving spirit with which the authors banished somberness and celebrated the pleasures of their life together.

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust, now enjoying a major renaissance, has at last found a biographer who himself once produced the ‘finest French novel written in English’ The Nation. For Edmund White author of an award winning biography of Jean Genet and of the classic gay novel A Boy’s Own Story, and known for his own haunting evocation of times past this portrait is the exquisite expression of a lifetime spent contemplating Proust. Proust teaches us to truly savor the master’s delicate perfection of style and his strange, charismatic personality not just the recluse obsessively rewriting his one massive work through the night, but the yearning, lonely boy; the dazzling wit and darling of Parisian salons; the seeker of fame; and the unhappy closeted homosexual whom this book is the first to explore openly. From the frothiest gossip to the deepest angst, here is a gem to be treasured not only by literati and students, but by anyone looking for an introduction to an enduring genius.

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s

An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. 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.

Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS

‘A searing, and often bitingly funny collection of personal essays by almost two dozen writers John Berendt, Brad Gooch, Allan Gurganus, and Sarah Schulman among them Loss within Loss remembers over twenty creative artists lost to AIDS in the past twenty years, including poet James Merrill, filmmaker Derek Jarman, and painter and writer David Wojnarowicz. Rather than being a harrowing, in the trenches account of AIDS…
Loss within Loss is a reflective, self possessed, and frequently inspiring testimonial, benefiting from the perspective that only time provides.’ David Bahr, The Advocate

Arts and Letters

Reading Edmund White is like sharing a cafe table with a witty professor, a clove-smoking aesthete, and a boy of fifteen. You never know who will speak the next line, but you know it will turn your head.

In these 39 lively essays and profiles, best-selling novelist and biographer Edmund White draws on his wide reading and his sly good humor to illuminate some of the most influential writers, artists, and cultural icons of the past century, among them Marcel Proust, Catherine Deneuve, George Eliot, Andy Warhol, Andre Gide, David Geffen, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Whether he’s praising Nabokov’s sensuality, critiquing Elton John’s walk ‘as though he’s a wind-up doll that’s been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs’, or describing serendipitous moments in his seven-year-long research into the life of Genet, White is unfailingly observant, erudite, and entertaining.

My Lives

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.’

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

The distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brings his literary mastery to a new biography of Arthur Rimbaud. Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished. Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell 1873 and his collection Illuminations 1886 are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. 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 running guns in Africa. He was thirty seven. Edmund White writes with a historian’s eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet’s relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive sometimes blatant threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud’s poems in those days, sodomy was a crime and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.

Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction

Certain to become a literary touchstone, Fresh Men collects the best new writing by emerging gay authors from around the nation. The critically acclaimed author Edmund White, chair of the Creative Writing program at Princeton and the author of more than 17 gay works, selects 20 original stories from the new crop of extraordinary writers. With equal parts sensitivity and irreverence, Fresh Men speaks to the broad range of gay experiences. From stories of coming out, coming of age, self representation and family to sex and love in the time of AIDS, from living in the closet to loving in a post gay world, this book highlights the complexities of gay life. This groundbreaking collection also embodies a wide spectrum of literary tastes, from works rich in experimental, transgressive elements to more conventional, traditionally crafted stories.

The Proust Project

‘Discovering Proust is like wandering through a totally unfamiliar land and finding it peopled with kindred spirits and sister souls and fellow countrymen…
They speak our language, our dialect, share our blind spots and are awkward in exactly the same way we are, just as their manner of lacing every access of sorrow with slapstick reminds us so much of how we do it when we are sad and wish to hide it, that surely we are not alone and not as strange as we feared we were. And here lies the paradox. So long as a writer tells us what he and only he can see, then surely he speaks our language.’ from the preface by Andr AcimanFor The Proust Project, editor Andr Aciman asked twenty eight writers Shirley Hazzard, Lydia Davis, Richard Howard, Alain de Botton, Diane Johnson, Edmund White, and others to choose a favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time and introduce it in a brief essay. Gathered together, along with the passages themselves and a synopsis that guides the reader from one passage to the next, these essays form the perfect introduction to the greatest novel of the last century, and the perfect gift for any Proustian. FSG will co publish The Proust Project in a deluxe edition with Turtle Point Press, Books & Co., and Helen Marx Books.

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