The Burning Library

The Burning Library (1994)

Edmund White is one of our most
celebrated novelists and astute social commentators. Now
this richly varied collection brings together his most enduring
essays from the past twenty-five years—a wide range
of writings on art, politics and sexuality.

Beginning with “The Gay Philosopher,”
a powerful statement about the centrality of friendship
in gay life, written just after the Stonewall Riots, and
ending with “The Personal Is Political,” a profoundly humanistic
discussion of the place of queer fiction in the current
dust storm of literary/identity politics, White constructs
a fascinating portrait of his times, his world and himself
as a writer. Animated by his uncanny novelist’s eye for
social observation, these essays offer a discerning chronicle—by
turns celebratory and elegiacal—of the changes in gay
life and culture from the beginning of the gay liberation
movement in the late sixties to the present; it is a progress
somberly punctuated by the occurrence of the AIDS crises
and its staggering costs, to White personally and to his
community. (The title, derived from the saying that when
someone dies a library burns, refers to a pervasive sense
of loss.)

A large part of the collection
is devoted to pieces that bring White’s prodigious critical
intelligence to bear upon some of the most important writers
of our time, including Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher
Isherwood (whom he counts among his key influences) as well
as Cormac McCarthy, William Burroughs, James Merrill, and
Truman Capote, with whom White has an unforgettable sweltering
interview. Among the other essays on art, there is a spirited
defense of the controversial aesthetics of White’s late
friend and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and a dazzling
appreciation of the singer formerly known as Prince.

Graced throughout by wit, humor,
and insight that never rely on received formulations of
correctness, this collection charts the progress of a courageous
and supremely humane write

I.
The Seventies

• The Political Vocabulary of Homosexuality
• The Irresponsible Art of Robert Mapplethorpe
• A Sensual Man with a Spiritual Quest: Christopher Isherwood
• The Politics of Genet: Michael Foucault
• Sweating Mirrors: A Conversation with Truman Capote
• This Is Not a Mammal: A Visit with William Burroughs
• James Schuyler
• Thoughts on White on Black on White: Coleman
  Dowell
• The Emperor of Signs: Roland Barthes
• Moves and Poems: Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Paradise Found
• Sexual Culture
• Nabokov: Beyond Parody
• Writer on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams
• The Woman Who Loved Memory: Christina Stead
• Keeping up with Jones: James Jones
• Their Masks, Their Lives—Harry Mathews’s Cigarettes
• Esthetics and Loss
• Danilo Kis: The Obligation of Form
• The Critic, the Mirror and the Vamp: A.W. Symons
• The Paris Review Interview

  III.
  The Nineties

• The Angel in the House: Tennessee
  Williams’ Letters
• Out of the Closet, onto the Bookshelf
• The Wanderer: Juan Goytisolo’s Border
  Crossings
• Genet’s Prisoner of Love
• Straight Women, Gay Men
• Black Like Whom?: Darryl Pinckney
• Southern Belles’ Letters: Cormac
  McCarthy
• Two Princes: Prince and Richard Price
• Two Eulogies: David Kalstone, Robert
  Mapplethorpe
• Pool in the Rocks by the Sea: Isherwood
  and Bachardy
• Marguerite Youurcenar
• Hervé Guibert: Sade in Jeans
• The Person Is Political: Queer Fiction
  and Criticism