Latest news with #EdmundWhite
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- General
- The Herald Scotland
Titillating tome as controversial as Lady Chatterley's Mollusc
His son used to help him wash windows during the summer holidays, so he was, of course, known as Shammy Davis Junior. Red turns bread A blatant example has been identified by Diary correspondent Alasdair Sinclair, who has uncovered a report stating that the Red Cross and the Red Crescent are to merge. Says Alasdair: 'It's alleged that a joint committee charged with managing the amalgamation has come up with a name for the combined body which, while reminiscent of the traditional titles of both societies, is shorn of any political association or religious imagery, and is in accordance with modern tastes… the Coloured Croissant.' Mind your language DELIGHTED linguist Sally Haggerty says: 'Learning French has encouraged me to live in the moment, because I currently can't conjugate any other verb tense.' The name game RESPECTED American author Edmund White died recently, which reminds Edmund McGonigle, the owner of the Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop in Glasgow's Otago Lane, of the time the literary lion stopped him in the street to ask directions to a restaurant. McGonigle admitted he couldn't assist, then asked if he happened to be chatting to Edmund White, man of letters. Receiving an affirmative answer, our correspondent announced that he, too, was an Edmund. At which point the famous novelist revealed that he came from a long line of Edmunds. 'I mentioned this later to a friend called Bill, who had German ancestry,' says McGonigle. 'He replied that he came from a long line of Willys, which gave me pause for thought…'
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on coming-out tales: from A Boy's Own Story to What It Feels Like for a Girl
'What if I could write about my life exactly as it was?' the teenage narrator of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story wonders. 'What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?' Published in 1982, A Boy's Own Story was hailed as one of the first coming-out novels, and its author, who died aged 85 last week, as a great pioneer of gay fiction. This auto-fiction relates White's privileged adolescence in 1950s Chicago, his struggles with his sexuality and search for a psychoanalytical 'cure'. In its extraordinary candour about sex – a hallmark of White's prodigious career – the novel remains startling today. It arrived at a pivotal moment in gay history: after the hope of the Stonewall uprising and just before the devastation of Aids, both of which White documented in what became an autobiographical trilogy with The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998). Lancashire in the 1970s might seem a world away from the American midwest two decades earlier, but Jeanette Winterson's account of her miserable childhood in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was similarly groundbreaking when it was first published in 1985. Forty years later, plans are under way for an RSC musical version next year. 'Why be happy when you could be normal?' her adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, an evangelical Pentecostal Christian, demands, when she catches the teenage Jeanette in bed with another girl. It doesn't get much more mainstream than a musical. But, as Winterson told the audience at the Hay literary festival last weekend, the BBC's Bafta-winning 1990 adaptation was a 'very brave' move after Section 28. 'It really shook up TV at that moment,' she said. Now another BBC adaptation is shaking up TV. What It Feels Like for a Girl (the title is a 2000 Madonna song), based on Paris Lees' 2021 memoir, powerfully shows what it meant to be a transgender teenager in the Midlands in the noughties. This personal story has once again landed at a time of intense public reckoning over LGBTQ+ rights. What It Feels Like for a Girl might be recent history, but, with ominous nods to a nascent internet, it is still a period piece. It is pre-social media and what Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation, has called 'the great rewiring of childhood'. Where once young people read to discover they were not alone, now they scroll. Each of these coming-out stories is rooted in a specific time and place. They are about class as well as sex, the salvation of books and music as well as romance. They are about loneliness, desire and a longing for escape – being a teenager, in short. Despite heartbreaking scenes of abuse and pain, they are also bursting with excitement. One of the conditions of youth is that one's 'own story' feels like the only story. This is why the coming-of-age narrative endures. In our digital age of toxic masculinity and intolerance, these memoirs call for truthfulness and compassion. They are reminders of the fragility of progress. 'If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance,' White wrote in his last book, The Loves of My Life, published in January, 'we should recognize we're still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen – and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know.'
Indian Express
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Express News Quiz: Checkmate, break up & IPL
Welcome to The Indian Express' weekly news quiz. You know the drill — there are 10 quiz questions below, woven around major events from India and the world. Your job is to sniff out the answers while being mindful of the timer. Any score above 80 will be commendable. Good luck, and see you on the other side! Before you try our other games, a look at the rich stories that couldn't make it into the quiz this week: Remembering Edmund White: When he proved himself wrong | 'Sirens' and the women that men love to blame | How Trump-Musk break-up can severely affect NASA and its future space missions More from Express Puzzles & Games BEGINNERS | The IE Mini Crossword, made with Indian English MEDIUM | Digital Sudoku with pen, pencil and checking tools EXPERT | Chess strategy puzzle: find best moves, solve trivia
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
NEW YORK — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White . It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.'
The Independent
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. "I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. ' Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life," he said. "Ed invented so many of us." White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: "How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story." He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated," he said. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex." He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. "He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'
