Skinned Alive: Stories

by Edmund White

Overview

The eight stories in this erotic and heartbreaking collection are barometers of difference. They measure the distance between an American expatriate and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and rough sex; the gulf between a man dying of AIDS and his uncomprehending relatives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307764522
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/08/2010
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	774,284
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about gay America—States of Desire—and Our Paris. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and teaches at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Michael Ondaatje

A wonderful collection...This is Edmund White at his most humorous and his most personal.

Editorial Reviews

This first collection of eight of his stories is also White's first fiction in eight years. Their quality varies. Best are the three autobiographical pieces written in the first person, including the title story about a middle-aged HIV-positive American writer living in Paris, and ``The Reprise,'' about a youthful dalliance and a middle-aged reconnection. Both recall the brilliance of White's autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and highlight his razor-sharp wit, his careful attention to details of both scene and personality. Yet the whole collection marks a significant change in White's traditionally rococo prose. The style is more restrained throughout (as the writer/narrator of the title story remarks: ``Speaking French so long had made me simplify my thoughts-whether expressed in French or English''). This works well in the best stories, accounting for half the book's length, but lends a didacticism to those tales narrated in the third person, in which White's expository prose largely contradicts the fiction writer's mantra to show, not tell. Even the weakest narratives are distinguished by sparkling writing (``Danny's eyes looked like old costume jewelry in which the gold backing is flaking off''; ``Lovers are attracted by opposites and then struggle to turn them into twins''), but complete satisfaction is to be found elsewhere than in this volume. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

White is a noted novelist (A Boy's Own Life, LJ 9/1/92), essayist (The Burning Library, LJ 10/1/94), and biographer, whose Genet (LJ 9/15/93) was one of LJ's Best Books of 1993. here he offers eight deeply personal stories.

Library Journal

"Wrenching, glorious, seductive . . . urgent and kinetic . . . delectably precise."—San Francisco Examiner

From the Publisher