Earlier this week
...in San Francisco. A haunting imagination of Gore Vidal's relationship with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, Terre Haute is Edmund White's two-character play about America's most notorious terrorist and the visit paid him just before his execution by a...
...propane that could be very cost-effective, be clean to operate and meet all the new federal requirements.” In addition to buses, White said, the road show will feature propane-powered lawn mowers. “People don’t take into account the amount of air...
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...Hell") had built into acclaim, especially for his experimentation with the prose poem. The legend was good to go. Novelist Edmund White ("The Farewell Symphony") serves up this tale at a brisk pace, starting with his own first readings of Rimbaud as a...
... Conventional wisdom holds that poets have little impact on popular culture. But renowned gay writer Edmund White’s engaging new biography of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud stands this myth on its head. White tells the story of Rimbaud who, though he wrote poetry only as a teenager, has influenced creative artists from Marcel Proust to the Surrealists to Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. In fewer than 200 pages, White makes the elements of Rimbaud’s life come alive, especially his battles with his overbearing mother, the moment when his lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, shot him in the wrist, his travels and, most important, his poetry. Rimbaud, who lived from 1854 to 1891, was born in Charleville, a small town in France. When he was 6, his father, an army captain, left the family. The family then moved to a lower-class neighborhood. His mother, a strict Catholic, determined that Rimbaud would be pious and well-behaved, became enraged when she found him reading Victor Hugo, and forbid “her children to play with the ragamuffin...
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...in historical terms. The book, however, cannot sustain the latter approach. I will now certainly seek out other books by Edmund White, but in the case of A Boy’s Own Story I am tempted to conclude that though writers have to be self-obsessed, when that...
...Crane was one of the unacknowledged founders of modern American literature, and Edmund White's imaginative re-creation of Crane's lost final work, dictated as he lies dying of TB, is a fine tribute from one poet of the gay subculture to another. White...
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