Beautiful Room Is Empty - Hardcover

Edmund White

3.92 out of 5 stars

3,307 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330334832 ISBN 13: 9780330334839

Publisher: Pan Books Ltd

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The sexually obsessed, yet conventional narrator from the book "A Boy's Own Story" has emerged from adolescence into early adulthood. He moves to New York lives a life of exploration and passion, revolving around Maria and Lou.

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From the Inside Flap

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World
From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.