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  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409042501
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook

The Burning Library

Writings on Art,Politics & Sexuality 1969-1993



Not only a brilliant collection of literary essays, but a moving and personal account of the changes in gay life over three decades.

The Burning Library brings together the best of Edmund White's essays, articles and reviews from more than twenty years, and presents a fascinating portrait of the writer and his time. It features interviews, profiles and essays which focus on the literary and cultural figures whose work has most influenced White: Nabokov, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tennessee Williams, Michael Foucault, Pasolini, Roland Barthes, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote and Marguerite Yourcenar. Interleaved with these are a series of articles which illuminate Edmund White's response to the political dimensions of homosexual life - a response that centres movingly on the importance of friendship when AIDS enters the scene. Edmund White's acuity, wisdom, and humour shine through in this remarkable and enlightening book, a tribute to a courageous and supremely humane writer.

  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409042501
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook

About the author

Edmund White

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His non-fiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the winner of the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and is the recipient of the 2019 National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His most recent novels are A Saint from Texas (2020) and A Previous Life (2021).

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Praise for The Burning Library

Mr. White projects in these essays the same persona that Jordan Elgrably . . . found in his novels of the 1980's: 'a man who yearns for beauty and love yet who often lives at the edge of the society he so painstakingly observes.'

New York Times