Sunday, January 18, 2009

Edmund White

Edmund White's novels include Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, and A Married Man. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Marcel Proust, The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, the memoir My Lives, and Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel. He teaches at Princeton University.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times:

What was the last book you couldn’t finish?

Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

* * *

Who are your literary influences?

Proust, Isherwood and Nabokov.

* * *

What book changed your life?

I was a teenager when I read Wuthering Heights, while I was in my school infirmary with a fever. It gave me a sense of the dark glamour of literature.
Read the complete interview.

Read an excerpt from White's Hotel de Dream, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hotel de Dream.

--Marshal Zeringue