APrevious Life

Award-winning, acclaimed writer: Edmund White is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (recommended by Susan Sontag), the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Lamda Literary's Visionary Award, has been named state author of New York, and Publishing Triangle named their debut novel prize after him, The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. His book Genet received the NBCC Award for biography and his memoir City Boy was a finalist for the NBCC for autobiography. Most recently, Edmund was honored with the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Awards.Beloved author: White is beloved by reviewers, readers, and authors. His work has been praised by Vladimir Nabokov, Colm Toibin, John Irving, Dwight Garner, Lorrie Moore, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and many, many more.Perfect time to publish: As readers and scholars take full stock of Edmund's legendary career - at 80 years old, he is starting to rack up major lifetime awards like the PEN Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction - and as the queer fiction Edmund pioneered moves from the margins to center stage, interest in Edmund's work has never been higher.Edmund White is an award-winning and prolific writer. His work, which includes the novel Our Young Man and the memoir The Flâneur, has revitalised American literature, breaking down boundaries of class, sexuality and power. His accolades include the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship under the recommendation of Susan Sontag. White lives in New York.______________ 'Elegant, filthy - and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.' - Guardian 'Intriguing and inventive.' - Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year" 'A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review _____________ A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, ageing and love. Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White. Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds. Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from Edmund White, exploring polyamory and bisexuality, ageing and loveElegant, erudite, raunchy and fun, America's great Man of Letters is working at the top of his form, giving us a pair of portraits hung against the pattern of history. What a joy to read this master of prose and invention!The best book in Edmund White's long and extraordinary careerWhite's project, as always, is to show us the human: the human body as defined by its urges and needs, and the human heart as it evolves through time and experience. In A Previous Life, he also gives us daring experiments of form, of autofiction, and of storytelling. Fresh and inventive and wiseAn erotically charged and ingenious metafictional story of a married couple . A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences Humorous and nearly always irreverent ... An erotically charged literary romp facing the loss of physical beauty and the inevitable passage of time