A new memoir from acclaimed author Edmund White about his life as a
reader.
Literary icon Edmund White made his name through his writing but
remembers his life through the books he has read. For White, each
momentous occasion came with a book to match: Proust's Remembrance of
Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of
homosexuality while he was at boarding school in Michigan; the Ezra
Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of
Stephen Crane that inspired one of White's novels. But it wasn't until
heart surgery in 2014, when he temporarily lost his desire to read, that
White realized the key role that reading played in his life: forming his
tastes, shaping his memories, and amusing him through the best and worst
life had to offer.
Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a
compendium of all the ways reading has shaped White's life and work. His
larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to
fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's
best-loved cultural figures. With characteristic wit and candor, he
recalls reading Henry James to Peggy Guggenheim in her private gondola
in Venice and phone calls at eight o'clock in the morning to Vladimir
Nabokov--who once said that White was his favorite American writer.
Featuring writing that has appeared in the New York Review of Books
and the Paris Review, among others, The Unpunished Vice is a
wickedly smart and insightful account of a life in literature.
