Edmund White | Granta Magazine

Edmund White

Edmund White’s books include a trio of autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He first appeared in Granta as a translator of Milan Kundera from the French, and is now a contributing editor to the magazine. In 2018, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction.

Edmund White on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Issue 71 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 71 padlock

Shrinks

Edmund White

‘Self-doubt, which is a cousin to self-hatred, became my constant companion.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 71
Essays & Memoir | Issue 71

The Unpunished Vice

Edmund White

‘Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126 padlock

American Vogue

Edmund White

‘Mumbling is proof of artistic verisimilitude.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126

Books I Read This Year

Various Contributors

A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.

In Conversation | Issue 126
In Conversation | Issue 126

Edmund White | Interview

Edmund White & Patrick Ryan

‘Although I was trying for the big-city and suburban realism of Yates, I didn’t mind adding a bit of fairy dust in the dialogue.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike

Edmund White

‘The freedom conferred by masks. Children and current wives cannot blame you for what your characters do and say.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126

The End?: Writers respond to John Barth

Various Contributors

'I suggest he put aside all his writing rituals and that he give away all his money – that way he might find his talent will be rebooted.'

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126

My First European

Edmund White

‘I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 126 padlock
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126 padlock

The Merry Widow

Edmund White

’She met my father in Texas and then they moved north, where I was born in Cincinnati.‘

Fiction | Issue 126 padlock
Fiction | Issue 126 padlock

Give it up for Billy

Edmund White

‘Were there moral cataracts that one could remove?’

Fiction | Issue 67
Fiction | Issue 67

Telling Him

Edmund White

‘The worst thing about knowing he was positive was that now he was under an obligation to tell his partners. Not that he informed the man he picked up in the park or the guy he lured over on the phone chatline.’

Fiction | Issue 67 padlock
Fiction | Issue 67 padlock

Skinned Alive

Edmund White

‘Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his ‘husband’, despite his revulsion against camp.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 17
Essays & Memoir | Issue 17

Prague: A Disappearing Poem

Milan Kundera

‘Prague, this dramatic and suffering centre of Western destiny, is gradually fading away into the mists of Eastern Europe, to which it has never really belonged.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 11
Essays & Memoir | Issue 11

A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out

Milan Kundera

‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’

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