Podcast appearances and mentions of Edmund White

Outward's Bryan Lowder and Christina Cauterucci talk to Alden Jones, editor of the new anthology, Edge of the World. With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernández, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn't just overdue—it's transformative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outward's Bryan Lowder and Christina Cauterucci talk to Alden Jones, editor of the new anthology, Edge of the World. With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernández, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn't just overdue—it's transformative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outward's Bryan Lowder and Christina Cauterucci talk to Alden Jones, editor of the new anthology, Edge of the World. With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernández, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn't just overdue—it's transformative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outward's Bryan Lowder and Christina Cauterucci talk to Alden Jones, editor of the new anthology, Edge of the World. With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernández, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn't just overdue—it's transformative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outward's Bryan Lowder and Christina Cauterucci talk to Alden Jones, editor of the new anthology, Edge of the World. With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernández, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn't just overdue—it's transformative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist, memoirist and biographer Edmund White joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his recent book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. White talks about the changes he has witnessed the LGBTQ+ community go through over the years and the hostility the transgender population faces under the Trump-Vance regime. He discusses a general concern older members of the community have about losing Social Security and health coverage should gay marriage become Trump's next target, as well as this administration's attempt to erase queer language from governmental archives. White previews his forthcoming novel about Louis XIV's gay brother titled Monsieur and reads from The Loves of My Life. To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Ian Johnson, Hunter Murray, and Vanessa Watkins.  Selected Readings: Edmund White  The Loves of My Life (2025) The Humble Lover (2025) Nocturnes for the King of Naples (2024) A Previous Life (2023) A Saint from Texas (2022) The Unpunished Vice (2018) The Flaneur (2015) Inside a Pearl (2015) Jack Holmes & His Friend (2012) City Boy (2010) A Boy Story (2009) Marcel Proust - A Life (2009) Anthologies, Foreword & Others: The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame (2022) A Luminous Republic (2020) The Stonewall Reader (2019) Such Small Hands (2017) The Violet Quill Club, 40 Years On - The Gay & Lesbian Review by David Bergman, January-February 2021 Felice Picano, Champion of Gay Literature, Is Dead at 81 - The New York Times Edmund White and Emily Temple on Literary Feuds, Social Media, and Our Appetite for Drama Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of Felice Picano's gay literary legacy, I would like to re-feature my conversation with him that happened in April 2024. May you rest well Felice and thank you for all you did for gay rights. I'm joined with award winning author Felice Picano who was a key figure of the Greenwich Village literary community from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. He was one of the founders of the modern gay literature movement, particularly through his involvement with the literary salon the Violet Quill. He explains how Violet Quill came to be, and why he decided to co-found this literary society with six other gay writers in New York City, including Andrew Holleran and Edmund White. Their goal? To meet and give each other creative feedback at a time when gay literature wasn't being taken seriously at all. During his time in Greenwich Village's gay literary scene, Felice explains that he met many notable authors like Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and yes even Truman Capote. In 1977, he founded Sea Horse Press, the country's first gay-oriented publishing house, and in 1981, he became editor-in-chief of The Gay Presses of New York. He continues to teach and write, and one day hopes that Hollywood matures enough to adapt more queer literature into films.You can find all of Felice's books here: ⁠https://www.felicepicano.net/⁠

The queens talk with gay literary icon Edmund White about his new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. (Miguel Murphy joins in the fun, too!)Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.                            Miguel's SHORE DITCH is available from Barrow Street.You can purchase Edmund White's new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, at BookWoman here. Bookwoman was founded to increase access to queer and feminist literature in Texas nearly fifty years ago. Read Colm Tóibín's essay, "On the Casual Brilliance of Edmund White"Read a tribute to Gary Indiana  in The Guardian here. Need a quick definition refresher of auto fiction? Here you go! Miguel mentions that composer Arnold Schoenberg's archive destroyed in LA fires, and you can read more about that here. Here's a dishy roundup of Nabokov's insults of DostoevskyFor a bit more about Larry Kramer's objections to The Farewell Symphony, read on.Learn more about Richard Howard and his poetry here. Edmund White and Michael Carroll talk about their relationship, and their experiences writing gay fiction here.And here's the Interview Magazine article we mention in the episode, in which gay writers ask Edmund White a question: “Tall Blonde With a Big Dick”: 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions" Finally, check out the fabulous Garth Greenwell's website: https://www.garthgreenwell.com  

Vanity Project are proud to present the first in the forthcoming trilogy of THREE COLOURS: White. In their first ever multi-episode saga Vanity Project daringly go where the likes of Aristotle and an exploratory lone monkey have gone before: to the White Material that made you. It's an episode about semen, and the perfect recipe for how to increase your load. Through a textual and cultural analysis semen is the fulcrum for a new discourse on race, the cultivation of male sexuality, and the last funny movie, Bridesmaids. We brave The Colonial Cumshot, Images of Bliss, and Edmund White on Robert Maplethorpe. We ask, is cum kind of a gay guy thing? Where were you when Diddy threw the first White Party?

Celebrated author Edmund White discusses The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (Bloomsbury, Jan. 28). Kirkus: “An irreverent and unapologetically provocative scrapbook of an aging author's sex life” (starred review). Then our editors share their top picks in books for the week.

Rowan Pelling, journalist and founding editor of the Erotic Review, and the film critic Tim Robey join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss the Oscar nominations and review Edmund White's The Loves of My Life, Steven Soderbergh's supernatural horror thriller Presence and Brazil! Brazil! a major exhibition featuring 20th century artists at the Royal Academy in London. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Claire Bartleet

Highlights from Toby Gribben's Friday afternoon show on Shout Radio. Featuring chat with top showbiz guests. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AVISO LEGAL: Los cuentos, poemas, fragmentos de novelas, ensayos y todo contenido literario que aparece en Crónicas Lunares di Sun podrían estar protegidos por derecho de autor (copyright). Si por alguna razón los propietarios no están conformes con el uso de ellos por favor escribirnos al correo electrónico ⁠cronicaslunares.sun@hotmail.com⁠ y nos encargaremos de borrarlo inmediatamente.  Si te gusta lo que escuchas y deseas apoyarnos puedes dejar tu donación en PayPal, ahí nos encuentras como @IrvingSun  https://paypal.me/IrvingSun?country.x=MX&locale.x=es_XC 

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with Yiyun Li & Edmund White about their book club of two, having three imaginary friends, the political vs the artistic, and loving each other all day long. Season Two is coming this fall!   Links Libsyn Blog https://www.barclayagency.com/speakers/yiyun-li https://www.nationalbook.org/people/edmund-white/ www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook

Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White with a foreword by Garth Greenwell reflects on love, life and time in this stunning epistolary novel. Both authors joined us to talk to us about bringing back this novel from 1978, the evolution of style and themes, musicality in creative writing and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.           Featured Books (Episode): Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White with Garth Greenwell A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Halloran Faggots by Larry Kramer Cleanness by Garth Greenwell The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Small Rain by Garth Greenwell The Loves of My Life by Edmund White

Watch/Listen to this and all episodes ad free by joining the ITBR Patreon and get a free trial for the ITBR Professor level! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/ivorytowerboilerroom⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ We're joined with award winning author Felice Picano who was a key figure of the Greenwich Village literary community from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. He was one of the founders of the modern gay literature movement, particularly through his involvement with the literary salon the Violet Quill. He explains how Violet Quill came to be, and why he decided to co-found this literary society with six other gay writers in New York City, including Andrew Holleran and Edmund White. Their goal? To meet and give each other creative feedback at a time when gay literature wasn't being taken seriously at all. During his time in Greenwich Village's gay literary scene, Felice explains that he met many notable authors like Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and yes even Truman Capote. In 1977, he founded Sea Horse Press, the country's first gay-oriented publishing house, and in 1981, he became editor-in-chief of The Gay Presses of New York. He continues to teach and write, and one day hopes that Hollywood matures enough to adapt more queer literature into films. You can find all of Felice's books here: https://www.felicepicano.net/ Follow ITBR on IG, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@ivorytowerboilerroom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, TikTok, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@ivorytowerboilerroom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and X, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@IvoryBoilerRoom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Our Sponsors: Be sure to follow The SoapBox on IG, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thesoapboxny⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and TikTok, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thesoapboxny⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and visit their website https://www.soapboxny.com/ to get your hands on their luxurious bath and body products! To subscribe to The Gay and Lesbian Review visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠glreview.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Click Subscribe, and enter promo code ITBR50 to receive 50% off any print or digital subscription. Follow them on IG, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@theglreview⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Head to Broadview Press, an independent academic publisher, for all your humanities related books. Use code ivorytower for 20% off your ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠broadviewpress.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠order. Follow them on IG, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@broadviewpress⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Order and follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mandeemadeit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (on IG) mention ITBR, and with your first order you'll receive a free personalized gift! Follow That Ol' Gay Classic Cinema on IG, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thatolgayclassiccinema⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Listen here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-ol-gay-classic-cinema/id1652125150⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thanks to the ITBR team! Dr. Andrew Rimby (Host and Director), Mary DiPipi (Chief Contributor), and Christian Garcia (Social Media Intern) --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ivorytowerboilerroom/message

Cat Sebastian writes queer historical romance. Her books have received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and she's been featured in the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and Jezebel. She was born in New Jersey and lived in New York and Arizona before settling down in a swampy part of the South. When she isn't writing, she's probably reading, having one-sided conversations with her dog, or doing the crossword puzzle. Interviewer Lori Sterling is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who focuses on helping LGBT+ individuals both at her private practice, Tea Time Therapy, and with her career as a medical care coordinator at JASMYN, a nationally recognized LGBT+ youth center located in Jacksonville Florida. When not advocating for or working with the community, you can most likely find her painting, playing Animal Crossing, or on the mat with her Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class.  READ Check out more of Cat's work from the library! - https://jkpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/results?qu=AUTHOR%3D%22cat+sebastian%22&te=  CAT RECOMMENDS "Here are some non-fiction books and memoirs I've recently read for research purposes, and which I've loved." The Summer Game by Roger Angell Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell Can't Anybody Here Play This Game by Jimmy Breslin A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill - https://jkpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/results?qu=drinking+life+hamill&te=  City Boy by Edmund White - https://jkpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/results?qu=TITLE%3D%22city+boy%22&qu=AUTHOR%3Dwhite&te=  --- Never miss an event! Sign up for email newsletters at https://bit.ly/JaxLibraryUpdates  Jacksonville Public LibraryWebsite: https://jaxpubliclibrary.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaxlibrary Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaxLibrary/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaxlibrary/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaxpubliclibraryfl Contact Us: jplpromotions@coj.net 

"There was a beautiful man who lived in the same building as me on the same floor . . ."

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly about their grand statements, big revelations, sentential seduction, queering forms, the power of vulnerability, and love poems. We're taking a break and will be back for our next episode with guests Yiyun Li & Edmund White on January 16,  2024. Happy Holidays, LitFam!   LINKS Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com www.melissafebos.com www.donikakelly.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook TRANSCRIPT Annie: (00:00) This episode is dedicated to Chuck, a dog we have loved, and Donika and Melissa's sweet pup.   Annie & Lito: Welcome to LitFriends! Hey Lit Friends!   Annie: Welcome to the show.    Lito: Today, we're speaking with memoirist Melissa Febos and poet Donika Kelly, lit friends in marriage,   Annie: About seduction, big boss feelings, and sliding into DMs.   Lito: So grab your bestie,   Annie & Lito: And get ready to fall in love!   Annie: What I love about Melissa Febos, and you can feel this across all four of her books, is how she declares herself free. There's no ambiguity to this. This is her story, not your telling of it, not your telling of her. I meet her on the page as someone who's in an act of rebellion or an act of defiance. And I was not really surprised but delighted to find that, when I read Donika Kelly, I had sort of the same reaction, same impression. And I'm wondering if that's true for you, and, Lito, what your understanding of vulnerability and its relationship to power is.   Lito: The power for me in these conversations, and the power that the authors that we speak with possess, seems to me, in the ways that they have found how they are completely unique from each other. And more so than in our other conversations, Donika and Melissa, their work is so different. And yet, as you've pointed out, the overlap, and the fire, the energy, the defiance, the fierceness is so present. And it was present in our conversation. And so inspiring.   Annie: Yeah. I'm thinking even about Melissa Febos has this Ted Talk. (01:54) Where she says "telling your secrets will set you free." And it feels that not only is that true, but it's also very much an act of self reclamation and strength, right? Where we might read it as an act of weakness. It's actually in fact, a harnessing of the self.   Lito: Right, it's not that Melissa has a need to confess. It's that she really uses writing to find the truth about herself and how she feels about something, which that could not differ more from my writing practice.   Annie: How so?   Lito: I find that I sort of, I write out of an emotion or a need to discover something, but I already sort of am aware of where I am and who I am before I start. I find the plot and the characters as I go, but I know sort of how I feel.   Annie: Yeah, I think for me, I do feel like writing is an act of discovery where maybe I put something on the page, it's the initial conception, or yeah, like you coming out of a feeling. But as I start to ask questions, right, for me, it's this process of inquiry. I excavate to something maybe a little more surprising or partially hidden or unknown to myself.   Lito: That's true. There is a discovery of, and I think you're, I think you've pointed to exactly what it is. It's the process of inquiry, and I think both of them, and obviously us, we're doing that similar thing. This is about writing, about this, this is about asking questions and writing through them.   Annie: Yeah, and Donika Kelly, we feel that in her work, her poetry over and over, even when they have the same recurring, I would say haunting images or artifacts. Each time she's turning it over and asking almost unbearable questions.   Lito: Right.   Annie: And we're joining her on the page because she is brave enough and has an iron will and says, no, I will not not look this in the eye.    Lito: That's the feeling exactly that I get from both of them is the courage, the bravura of the unflinching.   Annie: I think something that seemed to resonate with you was (03:58) how they talk about writing outside of publishing right? Yeah.   Lito: Yeah, I love I love that they talk about writing as a practice regardless, they're separated from The need to produce a work that's gonna sell in a commercial world in a capitalist society. It's more about the daily practice, and how that is a lifestyle and even what you said about the TED talk, that's just her. She's just talking about herself. Like that she's just telling an absolute truth that people don't typically talk about.   Annie: Right. And it's a conscious, active way to live inside one's life. It's a form of reflection, meditation, and rather than just moving through life, a way to make meaning of the experience.   Lito: I love that you use the word meditation because when you talk about meditation, you think of someone in a lotus position quietly being, but the meditations that both of them do, these are not quiet.   Annie: No. And of course we have to talk about how cute they are as married literary besties.   Lito: Oh my god, cute and like, they're hot for each other.   Annie: Oh my god.   Lito: It's palpable.   Annie: So palpable, sliding into DMs, chatting each other up over email.   Lito: They romanced each other, and I hope—no—I know they're gonna romance you, listener.   Annie: We'll be right back.   Lito: (05:40) Back to the show.   Annie: Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the best-selling essay collection Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a notable book by NPR, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, and others. Her craft book Body Work is a national bestseller and an Indie's Next Pick. Her forthcoming novel The Dry Season is a work of mixed form nonfiction that explores celibacy as liberatory practice. Melissa lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, and is a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Lito: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award for poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Donika has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and was long listed for the National Book Award. (06:00) Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Annie: Well, thank you for joining us for LitFriends to talk about the ultimate lit friendship. It does seem like you've won at the game of lit friends a little bit, having married your lit friend. I think of you both as writers who are in the constant act of subversion and resisting erasure. And that's the kind of work that Lito and I are drawn to, and that we're trying to do ourselves. And your work really shows us how to inhabit our bravest and most complex selves on the page. So we're really grateful for that.   Melissa: Thanks.   Annie: Yeah, of course. I mean, Donika, I think about poems of yours that my friends and I revisit constantly because we're haunted by them in the best way. They've taken residence inside of us. And you talk about what it means to have to do that work. And you've said, "to admit need and pain, desire and trauma and claim my humanity was often daunting. But the book demanded I claim my personhood."   And Melissa, I think you know how much your work means to me. I mean, as someone who is raised as a girl in this country and writing creative nonfiction, Body Work should not be as revelatory as it is. Yet what I see is that you're shaping an entire generation of nonfiction writers, many of them women. So, you know, also very grateful for that. And you've talked about that in Body Work. You've said "the risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery to place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you." So we'll talk more in a bit about courage and vulnerability and how you all do the impossible things you do, but let's dive into your lit friendship.   Melissa: Thank you, Annie, for that beautiful introduction.   Donika: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk about our friendship.   Lito: We're so excited to have you here.   Melissa: Talk about our special friendship.   Annie: Very special friendship. Friendship with benefits.   Lito: So tell us about your lit friend, Melissa, tell us about Donika.   Melissa: (09:07) Tell us about her. Okay, she's fucking hilarious, like very, very funny and covers a broad spectrum of humor from like, there's a lot of like punning that goes on in our house, a lot of like silly wordplay, bathroom humor, and then like high level, like, literary academic sort of witticism that's also making fun of itself a lot. And we've sort of operated in all of those registers since like the day we met.   She is my favorite poet. There's like those artists that whose work you really appreciate, right? Sometimes because it's so different from your own. And then there are those artists whose work registers in like a very deep sort of recognition where they feel like creative kin, right? And that has always been my experience of Donika's work. That there is a kind of creative intelligence and emotionality that just feels like so profoundly familiar to me and was before I knew anything about her as a human being.   Okay, we also like almost all the same candy and have extremely opposite work habits. She's very hot. She only likes to watch like TVs and movies that she's seen many times before, which is both like very comforting and very annoying.   Lito: Well, I'm gonna have to follow that up now. What are some of the top hits?   Melissa: Oh, for sure, Golden Girls is at the very top. I mean…   Annie: No one's mad at that.   Lito: We can do the interview right now. Perfect. All we need to know. A++!   Melissa: She's probably like 50% of the time that she's sleeping, she falls asleep to the soundtrack of the Golden Girls or Xena, maybe. But we've also watched the more recent James Bond franchise, The Matrices, (11:00) and Mission Impossible, never franchises I ever thought I would watch once, let alone multiple times at some point.   Annie: I mean, Donika, your queerness is showing with that list.   Lito: Yeah.   Donika: I feel seen. I feel represented accurately by that list. She's not wrong. She's not wrong at all. But I've also introduced to her the pleasure of revisiting work.   Melissa: That's right.   Donika: And that was not a thing that Melissa was doing before we met, which feels confusing to me. Because I am a person who really likes to revisit. She was buying more books when we met, and now she uses the library more, and that feels like really exciting. That feels like a triumph on my part. I'm like…   Annie: That is a victory. Yeah.   Donika: …with the public services.   Melissa; Both of these examples really allude to like this deep, fundamental sort of capitalistic set of habits that I have, where I… like there's like this weird implicit desire to try to read as many books as possible before I perish, and also to hoard them, I guess. And I'm very happy to have been influenced out of that.   Annie: Well it's hard not to think—I think about that tweet like once a week that's like you have an imaginary bookshelf, and there are a limited amount of books on that you can read before you die, and that like troubles me every day.   Melissa: Yeah it's so fucked up. (12:22) I don't want that. It's already in my head. I feel like I was born with that in my head, and I'm trying to get free.   Lito: Same. Serious book FOMO, like…   Donika: There are so many books y'all.   Lito: I know. It's not possible.   Donika: And, it's like, there are more and more every year.   Annie: Well, uh Donika tell us about Melissa.   Donika: Oh Melissa As she has already explained we have a lot of fun It's a funny household. She's hilarious. Um, and also she's a writer of great integrity, which you know I'm sitting on the couch reading Nora Roberts, and she's like in her office hammering away at essays, and I don't know what's going on in there. I'm very nosy. I'm a deeply nosy person. Like, I just I want to know like what's going on. I want to know the whole history, and it's really amazing to be with someone who is like here it is.   Annie: How did you all meet?   Donika: (13:20) mere moments after Trump was elected in 2016. I was in great despair. I was living in Western New York. I was teaching at a small Catholic university. Western New York is very conservative. It's very red. And I was in this place and I was like, this place is not my place. This place is not for me. And I was feeling very alone. And Melissa had written an essay that came out shortly after about teaching creative writing at a private institution in a red county. And I was like, oh, she gets it, she understands.   I started, I just like looked for everything. I looked for like everything that she had written. I read it, I watched the TED talk. I don't know if y'all know about the TED talk. There was a TED talk. I watched the TED talk. I was like, she's cute. I read Whip Smart. I followed her on Twitter. I developed a crush, and I did nothing else. So this is where I pass the baton. So I did all of that.   Melissa: I loved Bestiaries, and I love the cover. The cover of her book is from this medieval bestiary. And so I just bought it, and I read it. And I just had that experience that I described before where I was just like, "Oh, fuck. Like this writer and I have something very deep in common." And I wrote her. I DMed her on Twitter.   Sometimes I obscure this part of the story because I want it to appear like I sent her a letter by raven or something. But actually, I slid into her DMs, and I just was like, "hey, I loved your book. If you ever come to New York and want help setting up a reading, like I curate lots of events, da da da." And I put my email in. And not five minutes later, refreshed my Gmail inbox, and there was an email from Donika, and…   Donika: I was like, "Hi. Hello. It's me."   Annie: So you agree with this timeline, Donika, right? Like, it was within five minutes.   Donika: Yeah, it was very fast. And I think if I hadn't read everything that I could get my hands on that Melissa had written, I may have been a little bit slower off the mark. It wasn't romantic. Like the connection, I wasn't like, oh, this is someone who like I want to (15:41) strike up a romantic relationship with, it really was the work. Like I just respected the work so much.   I mean, I did have a crush, like that was real, but I have crushes on lots of people, like that sort of flows in and out, but that often is a signifier of like, oh, this person will be my friend. And I was still married at the time and trying to figure out, like that relationship was ending. It was coming to a quick close that felt slow. Like it was dragging a little bit for lots of reasons.   But then once it was clear to me that I was getting divorced, Melissa and I continued writing to each other like for the next few months. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, I'm getting divorced. I was like, I'm getting divorced. And then suddenly the emails were very different. From both of us. It wasn't different.   Melissa: There had been no romantic strategy or intent, you know, and I think which, which was a really great way to, we really started from a friendship.   Annie: And sounds like a courtship really. I mean, it kind of is an old fashion.   Melissa: Yeah, in some way, it became that. I think it became that. But I think it was, I mean, the best kind of courtship begins as a, as a friendly courtship, you know what I mean? Where it was about sort of mutual artistic respect and curiosity and just interest. And it wasn't defined yet, like, what sort of mood that interest would take for a while, you know?   Lito: So how do you seduce each other on and off the page?   Donika: That's a great question.   Melissa: That is a great question.   Donika: I am not good at seduction. So that is not a skill set that is available to me. It has never been available.   Lito: I do not believe that.   Annie: I know. I'm also in disbelief out here, really.   Melissa: No one believes it, but she insists.   Annie: I feel like that's part of the game, is my feeling, but it is not.   Melissa: It's not. Here's the thing I will say is that like Donika, I've thought a lot about this and we've talked a lot about this because I balked at that statement as well. It's like Donika is seductive. Like there are qualities about her that are very seductive, but she does not seduce people. You know what I mean? Like she doesn't like turn on the charisma and shine it at you like a hypnotist. Like that's not… (18:08) that's not her form of seduction, but I will say…   I can answer that question in terms of like, I think in terms of the work, since we've been talking about that, like in a literary way, both in her own work, like the quality, like just someone who's really good at what they do is fucking sexy, you know? Like when I was looking for like a little passage before this interview, I was just like, "ah, this is so good." Like it's so attractive when someone is really, really good at their craft. right? Especially when it's a crop that you share.   Donika: So Melissa does have the ability to turn on what she has written about, which I think is really funny. Like she like she has like, she has a very strong gaze. It's very potent. And one of my gifts is to disrupt that and be like, what are you doing with your eyes? And so like, when I think about that in the work, when I'm reading her work, and I'm in like its deepest thrall, it is that intensity of focus that really like pulls me in and keeps me in. She's so good at making a grand statement.   Melissa: I was just gonna bring that up.   Donika: Oh, I think she and I like often get to, we arrive at sort of similar places, but she gets there from the grand statement, and I get there from the granular statement, like it's a very narrow sort of path. And then Melissa's like, "every love is a destroyer." I was like, whoa, every one? And there's something really compelling about that mode of— because it's earnest, and it's backed up by the work that she's written. I would never think to say that.   Melissa: I have a question for you, lit friend. Do you think you would be less into me if I weren't? Because I think for a nonfiction writer, I'm pretty obsessed with sentences. It's writing sentences that makes, that's the thing I love most about writing. It's like where the pleasure is for me. So I'm a pretty poetically inclined nonfiction writer. If I were less so, do you think that would be less seductive to you as a reader or a lit friend?   Donika: I mean, that's like asking me to imagine like, "so, what if… (20:30) water wasn't wet?" I just like, I can't like, I can't imagine. I do think the pleasure of the sentence is so intrinsic to like, I think there's something in the, in your impulse at the sentence level. That means that you're just careful. You're not rushing. You're not rushing us through an experience or keeping us in there and focused. And it's just it's tricky to imagine, or almost impossible to imagine what your work would look like if that weren't the impulse.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's an essential part of your style in some ways, that you're taking that time.   Melissa: Mm-hmm.    Annie: And how you see the world. Like I don't even think you would get to those big revelations Donika's talking about without it.   Melissa: Yeah. Right. I don't, yeah, I don't think I would either. We'll be right back.   Lito (21:19) Hey Lit Fam, Lit Friends is taking a break for the holiday. We hope you'll join us for our next episode with our guests, Ian Lee and Edmund White on January 16th. Till then, may your holiday be lit, your presents be numerous, and your 2024 be filled with joy and peace. If you'd like to show us some love, please take a moment now to follow, subscribe, rate, and review the LitFriends Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a few moments of your time will help us so much. Big hugs to you and yours. Thank you for listening. And thank you for making season one a big success!   Annie: (22:05) Welcome back.   Lito: I've noticed that both of you, you know, you have your genres that you work in, but within that you're experimenting a lot with form and structure. Does anything of that come from being queer? I guess it's a question about queering forms of literature, and what that has to do also with the kinds of friendships that queer people have, and if that's different, maybe. So I guess I'm asking to connect form with queerness and friendship.   Melissa: That's a beautiful question. I think, and I'm starting with thinking about my relationship to form, which has been one of inheriting some scripts for forms. This is what an essay should look like. This is what plot structure looks like. This is how you construct a narrative. And sort of taking those for granted a little bit, and then pretty early on, understanding the limitations of those structures and the ways that they require that I contort myself and my content such that it feels like a perversion or betrayal of sort of what I'm dealing with, right? And so the way I characterize my trajectory, the trajectory of my relationship to form has been sort of becoming conscious of those inherited forms, and then pushing the boundaries of them and modifying them and distorting them and adding things to them and figuring out, letting my work sort of teach me what form it rests most easily in and is most transparent in. And I suspect that my relationship to friendship and particularly queer friendship mimics that.   Donika: Yeah, that sounds right to me. And I'm reminded of Denise Levertov has this essay titled "On the Function of the Line." And in it, she presents an argument that closed forms, received forms, are based on a kind of assumption of resolution, and that free verse or open design, like in a poem, it shows evidence of the speaker's thinking.   (24:24) Right? So that where the line breaks, the speaker is pausing, right? To gather their thoughts or like a turn might happen that's unexpected that mimics the turns in thinking. And I really love that essay. Like that essay is one of my favorites. So when I think about my approach to form, I'm like, what is the shape that this poem is asking for? What is the shape that will do, that will help the poem do its best work? And not even like to be good, but just like to be true.   I really love the sonnet shape. Like it's one of my favorite shapes. And it's so interesting and exciting to use a shape that is based on like argumentative structure or a sense of resolution, to explore. Like to use that as an exploratory space, it feels like queering our, like my expectations of what the sonnet does. Like there's something about the box. If I bounce around inside that box, there's gonna be something that comes out of that, that I wouldn't necessarily have gotten otherwise, but it's not resolution. Like the point is not resolution.   And when I think about my relationships and my chosen family, in particular, and to some degree actually my given family, part of what I'm thinking about is how can I show up and care and what does care look like in this relationship and how can I make room to be cared for? And that's so hard, like being cared for is so much more alien to me than, like, as a concept, like I feel like very anxious about it. I'm like, "am I asking for too much?" And like over and over again, my chosen family is like, "no, it's not too much. Like we, we got each other."   Melissa: I think particularly for queer people, we understand that it doesn't preclude romance or healthy kinds of dependency or unhealthy kinds of dependency, you know, that all of the things that happen in a very deep love relationship happen inside of friendship, where I think sort of like straight people and dominant culture have been like, "oh, no, like friendship isn't the site of like great romance or painful divorce or abuse." And queer people understand that all of those things happen within relationships that we call friendships.   Annie: (26:46) Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing you both talk about kind of queer survival and joy and even, Donika, what you were saying about having to adjust to being cared for as a kind of, you know, that's a sort of, to me, it's a sort of like a survivor's stance in the world. One of the things that I love about my kinship with Lito as, you know, my queer lit friend and, you know, brother from another mother is that he holds that space for me and I, you know, vice versa.   Even thinking about vulnerability, I think you both wield vulnerability as a tool of subversion too, right? And again, Lito and I are both creating projects right now that require a kind of rawness on the page. I'm about to publish a memoir called Sex with a Brain Injury, so I'm very consciously thinking about how we define vulnerability, what kind of work it does to reshape consciousness in the collective. And the ways that you each write about trauma helps us understand it as an act of reclamation, you know, power rather than powerlessness. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what is or what can be transformative about the confessional and maybe even more to the point, what does your lit friend teach you about vulnerability?   Melissa: (28:06) Oh, God, what doesn't she teach me about vulnerability? It's interesting because like you're correct that vulnerability is like very central to my work and to the like lifelong project of my work, and also like there's literally nothing on earth I would like to avoid more. And I don't think that is visible in my work, right? Because my work is the product of counteracting that set of instincts, which I must do to survive because the part of me that wants to avoid vulnerability, its end point is like literally death for me.   It is writing for me often starts from like kind of a pragmatic practice. I don't start like feeling my feelings. I write to get to my feelings and sometimes that doesn't happen until like after a book is published sometimes. You know like it's really interesting lately I've been confronting some feelings in like a really deep way that I think I have gotten access to from writing Girlhood, which came out in 2021. And it's like I had to sort of lay it all out, understand what happened, redefine my role in it and everyone else's. And I definitely had feelings while I was writing it. But like the feelings that Donika refers to as the big boss, like the deepest feelings about it. Like I, I feel like I'm only really getting. to it now.   My relationship to vulnerability, it's just like, it's a longitudinal process, you know? And there's no one who's taught me about that and how to be sort of like gentle and patient within that and to show up for it than Donika.   And I'm just thinking of like, you know, starting from pretty early in our relationship, she was working on the poems in The Renunciations, and over the years of our early, the early years of our relationship, she was confronting some childhood, some really profound childhood trauma. And she was doing that in therapy. And then there were like pieces of that work that she had to do in the poems. And I just watched her not force it. And when it was time, she like created the space to do the work. And like, I wasn't (30:35) there for that. I don't think anyone else really could have been there for that. And just like showing up for that work.   And then like the long tail of like publishing a book and having conversations with people and the way that it changes one's relationship and like the act of the vulnerability—achieved feels like the wrong word—but the vulnerability like expressed or found in the writing process, how that is just like a series of doorways and a hallway that maybe it never terminates. Maybe it doesn't even turn into death. I don't know. You know, but I've just seen her show up for that process with like a patience and a tenderness for herself at every age that I find incredibly challenging. And it's been super instructive for me.   Donika: Ooh. I, I'm, it makes me really happy to know that's your experience of like being like in like shared artistic space together. I think I go to poetry to understand, to help myself understand what it is that I'm holding and what it is that I wanna put down. Like that's what the poems are for. You know, like the act of writing helps me sort out what I need and what I wanna put down because narrative is so powerful. It feels like the one place where I can say things that are really hard, often because I've already said them in therapy.   Right? So then it's like, I can then explore what having said those hard things means in my life or how it sits in my life. And what Melissa shows me is that one can revise. I know I've said this like a few times, but that one can have a narrative. Like I think about reading Whipsmart and the story that she has about herself as a child in Whipsmart, and then how that begins to change a bit in Abandon Me. And then in Girlhood, it's really disrupted. And there is so much more tenderness there, I think. It looks really hard. Like, honestly, that joint looks hard because I might be in a poem, but I'm in it for like, like we're in it, like if I were to read it out loud for like a minute and a half.   Melissa: (33:50) It's interesting hearing you talk. I wonder if this is true. I think I'm hearing that it is true. And I think that's where it's with my experience that you often get to the feelings like in therapy or wherever, and then write the poems as more of a sort of emotional, but like also cognitive and kind of systemic and like a way of like making sense of it or putting it in context. And I think very much I, there'll be like deeply submerged feelings that emerge only as like impulses or something, you know, but I experience writing— I don't that often feel intense emotion while I'm writing. I think it's why that is writing is almost always the first place that I encounter my own vulnerability or that I say the like unspeakable thing or the thing that I have been unable to say. I often write it and then I can talk to my therapist about it or then I can talk to Donika about it.   And I think I can't. I'm too afraid or it feels like too much to feel the feelings while I'm writing. So I sort of experience it as a cognitive or like intellectual and creative exercise. And then once I understand it, sometime in the next five years, I feel the feelings.   Annie: Do you feel like it's a kind of talking to yourself or like talking outside of the world? Like what is it in that space that does that for you?   Melissa: Yeah, I do. I mean, it's like. Talking outside the world makes more sense to me than talking to myself. I mean, it is talking to myself, right? It's a conversation with myself, but it's removed from the context of me in my daily life. That's why it's possible. Within my daily life, I'm too connected to other people and my own internal pressures and just like the busy, superficial part of me that's like driving a lot of my days. I have to get away from her in order to do that work.   And so the writing really happens in a kind of separate space and feels like it is not, it has a kind of privacy that I don't experience in any other way in my life, where I really have built or found a space where I am never thinking about what other people think of me, and I'm not imagining a skeptical reader. (35:18) It is really like this weird spiritual, emotional, creative, intellectual space that is just separate from all of that, where I can sort of think and be curious freely.   And I think I created that space or found it really early on because I was, even as a kid, I was a person who was like so concerned with the people around me, with the adults around me, with what performances were expected of me. And being a person who was like very deeply thinking and feeling, I was like, well, there's no room for that here. So I need to like find somewhere else to do it. And so I think writing became that for me way before I thought about being a writer.   Lito: That's so fascinating to me. I think that's so different than how I work or Donika works or a lot of people I know. We'll be right back.   Lito: (36:26) Back to the show.   So this question is for both of you really, but it just makes me wonder then like, what is the role for emotion, but in particular anger? How does that like, when things get us angry, sometimes that motivates us to do something, right? So if you're not being inspired by an emotion to write, you're writing and then finding it, how does anger work as not only a tool for survival, but maybe a path towards personhood and freedom?   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking, I can't write out of that space, the space of anger. It took me a long time to get in touch with anger as a feeling. That took a really long time because in my family, in my given family, the way that people expressed anger was so dangerous that I felt that I didn't want to occupy those spaces. I didn't want to move emotionally into that, into that space if that was what it looked like. And it took me a long time to figure out how to be angry. And I'm still not sure that I'm great at it. Because I think often I'm moving quickly to like what's under that feeling. And often what's under my feelings of being angry, often, not always, is being hurt, feeling hurt. And I can… write into exploring what that hurt is, because I know how to do that with some tenderness and some care.   Melissa: I feel similarly, which is interesting, because we've never talked about this, I don't think. But anger is also a feeling that I think, for very different reasons, when I was growing up… I mean, I think just like baseline being socialized as a girl dissuaded me from expressing anger or even from feeling it, because where would that go?   But I also think in the particular environment that I was in, I understood pretty early that my expressions of anger would be like highly injurious to the people around me and that it would be better if I found another way to express those things. I think my compulsive inclinations have been really useful in that way. And it's taken me a lot of my adult life to sort of… (38:44) take my anger or as Donika said, you know, like anger for me almost always factors down to something that is largely powerlessness, you know, to sort of not take the terror and fury of powerlessness and express it through like ultimately self harming means.   Writing can be a way for me to arrive at like justifiable anger and to sort of feel that and let that move through me or to be like, oh, that was unjust. I was powerless in that situation. You know? Yeah, it has helped me in that way. But like, if I'm really being honest, I think I exhaust myself with exercise. And that's how I mostly deal with my feelings of anger.   Annie: Girl.   Melissa: Yeah, there's also a way I will say that like, I do think it actually comes out in my work in some ways. Like there is like a very direct, not people-pleasing vibe and tone in my work that is genuine, but that I almost never have in my life. Like maybe a little bit as a professor, but like    When Donika met me, she was like, "Oh… like you're just like this little gremlin puppy person. You're not like this intense convicted former dominatrix." You know, which is, I express it in my writing because it is a space where I'm not worried about placating or pleasing really. It's a space where I'm, I am almost solely interested in what I actually think.   Donika: I was just thinking about like the beginning of, I think it's "Wild America," when you talk about like not cleaning your room, Melissa. Because you didn't, like when you were a kid, right? It was like you cleaned your room when you wanted to appear good, but that didn't matter to you when you were alone in your room. Like you could get lost in a book or you could, you know, like just be inside yourself alone when you were alone in your room. And that's one of my favorite passages that you read. Like I'm always sort of like mouthing along, like it's a song.   Melissa: (40:57) I'm just interested and I really love the sort of conception of like a girl's room as a potential space that sort of maps on to the way I described the writing space where it's just like a space where other, where the gaze of others, or the gaze that we're taught to please like can be kept out to some extent. And just like, you know, that isn't true, obviously for like lots and lots and lots of girls, but just that there is an impetus for us to create or invent or designate a space where that is true.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's what she's up to in "A Room of One's Own."   Annie: It makes me think of like girls' rooms as like kind of also these reductive spaces, like they all have to have pink or whatever, but then you like carve out a secret space for yourself in that room, which I think is what you're talking about with your writing.   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking about what happens when you don't have a room like that, cause I didn't, like I absolutely did not have a room that was… inviolable in some way or that like really felt like I could close the door. But writing became a place where that work could happen and where those explorations could happen and where I could do whatever I want and I had control over so many aspects of the work. And I hesitated because I was saying I didn't have that much control over the content.   Like I might think, oh, I'm gonna write a poem about this or a poem about that. And as is true with most writing, the poems are so much smarter and reveal so much more than I might have intended, but I could like shape the box. There are just like so many places to have control in a poem, like there's so many mechanisms to consider where like when Melissa was first sharing like early work with me, I would get so nervous because I would wanna move a comma.   Because in a poem, like that's a big deal, moving somebody's commas around, changing the punctuation. And she was like, "it doesn't matter."   Melissa: I would get nervous because she would be like, "well, I just have one note, but it's like, kind of big." And I would be like, "oh, fuck, I failed." And she would be like,    Donika: "What's going on with these semicolons?"   Melissa: She'd be like, "I just, these semicolons."   Annie: You know, hearing you both talk about (43:20) how you show up for one another as readers, right? In addition to like romantic partners. I mean, we do have the sense, and this can be true of all marriages, queer or otherwise, where like we as readers have a pretty superficial understanding of what you kind of each bring to the table or how you create this protective space or really see one another. I imagine that you've saved yourselves, but I'm curious about to what extent this relationship may have also been a way to save you or subvert relationships that have come before. And yet at the same time, we've asked this question of other lit friends too, which is, you know, what about competition between lit friends? And what does that look like in a marriage? What is a good day versus a bad day?   Donika: I mean, we could be here for years talking about that first question. And so I'm gonna turn to the second part to talk about competition, which is much easier to handle.   I feel genuinely and earnestly so excited at the recognition that Melissa has received. Part of what was really exciting for me about the beginning of our relationship that continues to be exciting is that, is getting to watch someone be truly mid-career and navigate that with integrity. It feels like such a good model, for how to be a writer.   I mean, she's much more forward-facing than I would ever want to be. But I think in terms of just thinking about like, what is the work? How, like, where is the integrity? Like, it's just, it's always so, so forward and it feels really grounding for me and us in the house, so it's always big cheers in here. It helps that we write in different genres. I think that's super helpful.   Melissa: I think it's absolutely key. Yeah.   Donika: It's not, I mean, I think, and that we have very different measures of ambition. I think those two things together are really, really helpful.   But I've read everything that Melissa has written, I think. (45:38) There might be like a few little, I mean, I've read short story, like that short, there was like a short story from like shortly, I think after you, like before you were in your MFA program, maybe.   Melissa: Oh my God. What short story?   Donika: I can't, I'll find it. And show it to you later.   Melissa: Is it about that little plant?   Donika: No, no, it might've been an essay. I'm not sure.   Annie: I love this. This is sort of hot breaking news on LitFriends.   Donika: It's like, I've just like, I did a deep Google dive. I was like, I want to read everything and it's, it feels really exciting.   Melissa: You know, I've dated writers before, and it was a different situation. And I think even if I hadn't, even before I ever did, I thought, that seems unlikely to work. Because even though there are lots of like obvious ways that it could be great, the competition just seemed like such a poison dart that it would be really hard to avoid because writers are competitive, and I'm competitive. And maybe it would have been harder if we were younger or something.   And certainly if we were in the same genre, I think actually, who knows? Maybe it would be possible if we were in the same genre, but it would require a little more care. Even if for some reason we would never publish again, we would keep writing. It just like it functions in our lives in similar ways. And it's like a practice that we came to, you know, I have a more hungry ambition or have historically. And I think our relationship is something that helps me keep the practice at the center because we're constantly talking about it. And I'm constantly observing Donika's relationship to her work. So it really hasn't felt very relevant. Like it's kind of shocking to me how, how little impact competition or comparing has in our relationship. It's really like not even close to one of the top notes of things that might create conflict for us, you know, and I'm so grateful for that. And so happy to have like underestimated what's possible when you have a certain level of intimacy and respect and sort of compatibility with someone.   Lito: We'll be right back.   Annie: (47:57) Welcome back. Well, then I'm wondering, you know, you both have had some like incredible successes in the last few years. And I'm wondering if conversely, you've been able to show up for one another in moments of high pressure or exposure, or, you know, having to confront the world, having been vulnerable on the page in the ways you have been.   Melissa: Donika was not planning on having a book launch for The Renunciations.   Donika: What's a book launch? Like, why do people do that?   Annie: Listen, mine's going to be a dance party, Donika. So…   Melissa: And I made, meanwhile, like when I published Abandon Me, I had a giant dance party that I had like several costume changes for during. But I remember feeling pretty confident about making a strong case multiple times for her to have a book launch for The Renunciations. And also like having a lot of respect and like tenderness watching her navigate what it meant to take work that vulnerable and figure out how to like speak for it and talk about it and like present it to the world. Parts of her would have preferred to just let the book completely speak for itself out there.    Donika: But you were right it was a good time.   Melissa: I was right.   Donika: Because like when Melissa's so when Girlhood came out it was like, that was still the time of like so many virtual events. And it was just like, I think that first week there was like something every day that week, like there was an event every day that week. And now, now like, again, I had to be talked into having a book launch. So I own this. Um, but I was like, Ooh, why, why would you do that? Oh, yeah. Four?   Melissa: This is definitely one of the ways that she and I are like diametrically opposed, and therefore I think, helpful to each other in sort of like creating a kind of tension that can be uncomfortable but is mostly good for both of us to be sort of pulled closer to the middle.   Donika: But my favorite part of that is then hearing you give advice to your friends who are very similar and be like, "whoa, you did too much. You put too many things on the calendar."     Melissa: (50:15) You know, some people would say that that's hypocrisy, but I actually think, I have a real dubious like position and thinking about hypocrisy because I am an expert in overdoing things. And so I think I speak from, I am like the voice of Christmas future. You know what I mean? I'm like, let me speak to you from the potential future that you are currently planning with your publicist. And like, it's not pretty and it doesn't feel good. And it's not, it has not delivered the feeling that you're imagining when you're scheduling all those events.   Annie: I can appreciate this. And I appreciate Donika's kind of role, this particular role in a relationship, because sometimes I just have to go see Leto and literally just lay on Lito and be like, stop me from doing anymore.   Melissa: I know, I know.   Lito: You and Sara are like super overachievers. I have to be like, "can you calm down?"   Annie: We do too much.   Lito: Way too much. What would you like to see your lit friend make or create next?   Donika: I got two answers to this. The first one is the Cape Cod lesbian mystery. I'm ready. You know, we got, I've offered so much assistance as a person who will never write prose. Um, but I got notes and ideas. The second one is, uh, a micro essay collection titled Dogs I Have Loved. Cause I think it would be a New York Times bestseller.   Lito: Oh, I love that.   Donika: I know.   Lito: Speaking of, who's the little gremlin puppy there?   Donika: Oh, yeah, that's Chuck. Chuck is a 15-year-old chihuahua. I've had him since he was a puppy.   Annie: Is Chuck like a nickname, or is that just, it's just Chuck?   Donika: It's just Chuck.   Lito: I love that.   Melissa: His nickname is Charles sometimes. One of his nicknames is Charles, but his full name is Chuck.   Melissa: OK, so I would say, I mean, my first thought at this question was like, I want Donika to keep doing exactly what she's been doing? As far as I can tell, she doesn't have a lot of other voices getting in the way of that process. My second thought is that I'm really interested. I've never heard her talk. She has no interest in writing prose of any kind. She is like deeply wedded to poetry. But I have heard her talk more recently about potential collaborations with (52:40) other artists, visual artists and other writers. And I would, I'm really excited to see what comes out of that space.   Lito: Would you all ever collaborate beyond your marriage?   Annie: I could see you all doing a craft book together.   Melissa: I feel like we could make like a chapbook that had prose and poems in it that were responding to a shared theme. I could definitely see that.   Donika: I really thought you were gonna say Love Poems for Melissa Febos, that's what you wanted to see next.   Melissa: I mean, I already know that that's on deck, so I don't... I mean, it's in, it's on the docket. It's on deck. Yeah. So…   Lito: Those sonnets, get to work on the sonnets.   Donika: Such a mess.   Melissa: This is real, you think, this is not, like, a conversation of the moment. This is…   Annie: Oh no, we can, this is history.   Donika: "Where's my century of sonnets?" she says.   Lito (53:33) What is your first memory?   Donika: Dancing?   Melissa: Donika telling me I'm pretty.   Annie (54:15.594) Who or what broke your heart first?   Melissa: Maddie, our dog.   Donika: Kerri Strug, 1996 Olympics. Vault.   Lito: Atlanta.   Donika: The Vault final. Yeah. Heartbreaking.   Lito: Who would you want to be lit friends with from any time in history, living or dead?   Donika: I just thought Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm gonna go with that.   Lito: I love Gwendolyn Brooks.   Donika: Oh yeah.   Melissa: My first thought is Baldwin.   Donika: It's a great party. We're at a great party.   Melissa: I just feel like I would be like, "No, James!" all the time.   Melissa: (54:30) Or like Truman Capote.   Lito: It'd be wild.   Donika: Messy. So messy.   Annie: What's your favorite piece of music?   Melissa: Oh my god, these questions are crazy! "Hallelujah"?   Donika: Oh god, there's an aria from Diana Damraus' first CD. She's a Soprano. And it's a Mozart aria, and I don't know where it's from, and I can't tell you the name because it's in Italian and I don't speak Italian, but that joint is exceptional. So that's what I'm gonna go with. Oh God, just crying in the car.   Lito: If you could give any gift to your lit friend without limitations, what would you give them?   Donika: Just like gold chains. So many gold chains. Yeah! If I could have a gold chain budget, it'd be a lot.   Annie: (55:23) Donika, we can do this.   Lito: Achievable.   Donika: I mean, yeah. Yeah.   Lito: Bling budget.   Donika: That's the first thing I thought.   Annie: Love it.   Donika: Just like gold, just thin gold chains, thick gold chains.   Melissa: I'm going to go with that, then, and say an infinite sneaker budget.   Lito: Yes. Oh, I want a shoe room. (55:50) That'd be awesome.   Melissa: We need two shoe rooms in this house, or like one. Or we just need to have a whole living room that's just for shoes.   Donika: I just like there's just like one closet that's just like for shoes. Like that's what we need.   Lito: That's great.   Donika: Yeah, but it's actually a room. Yes. With like a sorting system, it's like computer coded.   Annie: Soft lighting. That's our show.   Annie & Lito: Thanks for listening.   Lito: We'll be back next week with our guests Yiyun Li and Edmund White.   Annie: Find us on all your socials @LitFriendsPodcast.   Lito: Don't forget to reach out and tell us about the love affair of you and your LitFriend.   Annie: I'm Annie Liontas.   Lito: And I'm Lito Velázquez. Thank you to our production squad. Our show is edited by Justin Hamilton.   Annie: Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker.   Lito: Lizette Saldana is our marketing director.   Annie: Our theme song was written and produced by Robert Maresca.   Lito: And special thanks to our show producer, Toula Nuñez.   Annie: This was LitFriends, Episode Three.    

S3 E4 - Welcome back to Whitgift Conversations, the podcast where we talk to staff and pupils about topics that are relevant to you.Now this is a great episode for anyone who's interested in finding out more about IB, that's the International Baccalaureate. Edmund White is the Director of IB and I get to ask him what the differences are between A levels and IB, we find out what's actually involved in the IB and we talk about choices and whether the IB choice is a risky one or not.That's all coming up in this episode and I know you're going to love it. So come with me as we dive into this conversation about IB, it's Edmund White.Whitgift School onlineWebsite: www.whitgift.co.ukWhitgift Global: https://www.whitgift.co.uk/globalTwitter: @WhitgiftSchool1Facebook: WhitgiftSchoolLinkedIn: whitgift-school

The rebirth of the East Village in the late 1970s and the flowering of a new and original New York subculture -- what Edmund White called "the Downtown Scene" -- arose from the shadow of urban devastation and was anchored by a community that reclaimed its own deteriorating neighborhood.In the last episode (Creating the East Village 1955-1975) this northern corner of New York's Lower East Side became the desired home for new cultural venues -- nightclubs, cafes, theaters, and bars -- after the city tore down the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955.By the mid-1970s, however, the high had worn off. The East Village was in crisis, one of the Manhattan neighborhoods hit hardest by the city's fiscal difficulties and cutbacks. It had become a landscape of dark, unsafe streets and buildings demolished in flame.But the next generation of creative interlopers (following the initial stampede of Greenwich Village beatniks and hippies) built upon the legacies of East Village counter-culture to create poems, music, paintings, and stage performances heavily influenced by the apocalyptic situations around them.This was something truly distinct, a creative scene that was thoroughly and uniquely an East Village creation -- punk and hardcore, murals and graffiti, fashion and drag. In this episode Greg hits the streets of the East Village in a special live-on-the-streets event, with musician and tour guide Krikor Daglian (of True Tales of NYC), exploring the secrets of the recent past -- from the origins of skateboarding to the seeds of the American alternative rock scene.FEATURING: CBGB, Supreme, the Pyramid, Club 57, Niagara, 7B, Brownies, and many othersAND special guests Bill Di Paola from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and Ramon 'Ray' Alvarez from Ray's Candy StoreALSO: Check out our Walking The East Village playlist, curated by Krikor and Greg -- on Spotify

Ett semesterparadis, och en del av en queer litteraturhistoria. Men författarnas och frigörelsens idylliska Fire Island rymmer också baksidor, reflekterar Kristofer Folkhammar. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna.Fire Island är en långsmal sandbank till ö strax utanför New York City. Ön är sagolikt vacker, omgiven av ett glittrande hav, utan bilvägar och bara en kort båttur från den stora staden. Den har sedan 1800-talet tjänat som semesteridyll. Och under lång tid, har den i olika skepnader varit känd som en gayvänlig turistdestination, där otaliga välkända queers tassat längs träspångarna, över vidderna, in i de svalkande skogarna. Jag har aldrig besökt Fire Island, men jag känner mig ändå väl bekant med ön. Inte bara som plats, men som ett återkommande berättelsemönster i amerikansk populärkultur. En bögisk trop, en gaymannens uppgång och fall-kurva, som börjar med frigörelsen i det soliga och öppna, eskalerar till besatt njutningskult och slutar i tragedi och död.Starkt i min sodomitiska minnesbank lyser inledningen av tevefilmen The Normal Heart, filmatiseringen av författaren och sedermera Act up-aktivisten Larry Kramers pjäs med samma namn. Det är 1981 och en båt lastad med glada, vackra män anländer till Fire Island. Huvudpersonen Ned Weeks knäpper sin tunna sommarskjorta i mötet med de smidiga Adoniskropparna, som trippar runt överallt på ön i färgglada speedos. Först tittar Ned nyfiket. Sedan är det som om de perfekta kropparna tittar tillbaka på honom, på hans håriga och otränade författarlekamen. Och hans sätt att stå vid sidan av festen, där han ler ansträngt åt sina extatiska vänner, och med nästan uppgiven blick sedermera ansluter till en osande orgie, rymmer så mycket av de melankoliska aspekterna av Kramers verk och gärning: Var det inte mer än såhär? Är det detta vi kämpat för? Innebär inte frigörelsen annat än excess? 1981 i New York står Aids-epidemin för dörren. Sex kommer att få dödliga konnotationer. Kramer kommer att radikaliseras. Som aids-aktivist riktas hans vrede både mot den homofobiska, passiva staten som låter människor dö, men också mot en naiv och njutningsfixerad bögkultur.I boken Fire Island – Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, tar den brittiske litteraturforskaren Jack Parlett sig an ön utifrån idén om ett paradis. Och begreppet paradis använder han kritiskt. Fantasier, skriver Parlett, är obegränsade och tillhör i teorin vem som helst, men detsamma går inte att säga om semesterorter. Med hjälp av författaren Toni Morrison betonar han hur paradiset som plats alltid skapas av dem som inte tillåts komma in i det.Så med lika delar upphetsad fascination, politisk granskning och litterärt nörderi formulerar Parlett i sin bok Fire Islands queera, och framför allt bögiska, litteraturhistoria.Walt Whitman och Oscar Wilde. WH Auden, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers och Patricia Highsmith. Edmund White och Andrew Holleran. Alla vistades de vid olika tider på ön. Arbetade. Älskade. Dansade. Söp.Parletts stora idol, poeten Frank O'Hara skrev en otrolig dikt under en vistelse på Fire Island där solen pratar med honom, ett exempel på O'Haras poetiska signum ”personism” – där diktens tilltal är riktad direkt till någon, eller något: ”enklare för mig att tala med dig här / ute. Jag behöver inte leta mig ner / mellan byggnader för att du ska lyssna.”O'Hara dog tragiskt på ön 1966. Han blev påkörd i mörkret av en av öns få bilar, efter att hans sällskaps strandtaxi fått motorstopp.Författaren James Baldwin åkte till Fire Island för att arbeta. Han förhöll sig avvaktande mot den dominerande vita, manliga gaykulturen, som var lika rasistisk och exotiserande som det övriga USA, under åren för medborgarrättsrörelsen. Dessutom tyckte Baldwin överlag illa om bohemeri. Han har skrivit om hur han inte gillade människor vars främsta syfte var njutning. Och han ansåg att det fanns få saker här i världen som var mer förödande än jakten på meningslösa sexuella erövringar.Parletts bok är skriven med lätt men tålmodig hand. Han låter sin ambivalens inför Fire Island få utrymme. I sin beskrivning av kopplingarna mellan plats, sexualitet och konst tecknar han verkligen skönheten och möjligheten till utlevelse som förvärvats i denna friska, soliga avskildhet. Och han lyfter fram de samtida konstprojekt som vill göra platsen mer inkluderande, till en tillgänglig getaway för fler än bemedlade, vita cis-bögar. Men han klarlägger också problemen, områdena där paradiset avgränsas eller solkas. Utöver rasismen och klassaspekten, skriver han om sina egna ätstörningar och alkoholproblem i förhållande till en kroppsfixerad och festorienterad bögkultur. Skam och internaliserad homofobi, som uppkommit utifrån men som känns inuti, är knappast de enda faktorerna som förhindrar ett hälsosamt sexuellt liv, skriver Parlett. Hans bok tycks undra: Hur kommer man in när man kommit ut? Och till vad? Boken är ofrånkomligt lika mycket en litteraturhistoria som en innerlig och infallsrik undersökning av vad ett community skulle kunna vara.Kanske är det för det turkosa vattnet som omger Fire Island, men jag kommer att tänka på prideflaggan, när jag läser Parletts bok. Regnbågsmönster har genom historien använts av olika sociala rörelser. Som symbol för Gay Pride började den användas under sent 1970-tal i San Francisco. Efter västvärldens enorma mainstreamifiering av prideflaggan under 2000-talet, har den uppdaterats i flera omgångar. Exempelvis med bruna och svarta fält för att belysa icke-vita pionjärer inom rörelsen, och ett blå-rosa-vitt mönster för att sätta fokus på transpersoners kamp och historia.Men det är inte första gången flaggan reformeras. Redan ett par år efter premiären i San Francisco reducerades de ursprungliga åtta färgerna till sex stycken. Det illrosa fältet, som sägs ha representerat sex, och det turkosa, tänkt att symbolisera konst, plockades bort av produktionstekniska skäl.Det diskuteras huruvida flaggans designer, konstnären Gilbert Baker, verkligen hade en tanke om att varje färg i prideflaggan skulle symbolisera en särskild kraft eller egenskap, eller om det är en efterhandskonstruktion. Men när jag läser Jack Parletts bok kommer en bild för mig. Den av hur ett lysande turkost fält, flimrande av berättelser och bilder, uppstått ur den spretiga priderörelsen, glidit ut från dess tydligaste symbol för rättighetssträvan, och blivit hängande intill den, en bit utanför atlantkusten.Turkos är en kluven färg, mellan blått och grönt. Lugn och samtidigt lekfull, andlig och ändå intensiv, lika delar kontemplativt vatten som rusigt neonljus.Frank O'Haras dikter gav Parlett tillgång till något som kändes som ett personligt språk för erfarenheten att älska andra män. Dikterna och längtan efter ett queert community lockade honom till Fire Island.Konst kan man ha till mycket. Bland annat kan man i konsten söka ett sammanhang, ett fält som sköljer igenom en, som om vartannat speglar och utmanar, vidgar och stör. Låt oss säga att detta fält är turkost. Låt oss säga att detta fält till sin karaktär är sandaktigt, fullt av undflyende skum, och samtidigt vasst av historiens bråte. Kristofer Folkhammar, poet, prosaist och kritiker Översättningen av Frank O'Haras diktcitat är artikelförfattarens egen.

Episode Reading List:* From Queer to Gay to Queer, James Kirchick* How Hannah Arendt's Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity, Blake Smith* When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That's Ahmari, James Kirchick* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, Blake Smith* Are Conservatives the New Queers?, Blake Smith* Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, John PistelliI have a working hypothesis that no one has suffered a more dramatic decline in a certain kind of social status, as a result of changes in left-liberal elite culture and politics, than white gay men. Less than a decade ago they were at the vanguard of social progress, having led a gay rights movement that achieved an extraordinary series of legal, political, and cultural victories. Now they're perceived as basically indistinguishable, within certain left-liberal spaces, from straight white men. In some activist circles they may be even more suspect, since they're competing for leadership roles and narrative centrality where straight men wouldn't presume (or particularly desire) to tread. My hypothesis, if it's accurate, is interesting on its own terms, as part of a much longer history in America of ethnic and other minority groups rising and falling in relative cultural, intellectual, and literary status. It's also interesting, however, for what it tells us about the recent evolution of left and liberal politics, as they've shifted and reshaped themselves in reaction to both great victories, like the legalization of gay marriage, and to depressingly intractable problems like the persistent racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and crime.I'm less interested in the justice or injustice of this shift in standing (though I'm somewhat interested) than I am in the facts of it and its implications. Why has it happened? What does it feel like for the people who have experienced it? What are its implications? Will there be a backlash? To assist me in thinking through what it all means, I invited to the podcast Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick. Jamie is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of last year's New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has long been an outspoken critic of some sectors of the gay left and what he perceives of as their desire to subordinate the project of achieving full civic and political equality for gay people to a more radical, revolutionary project to tear down conventional bourgeois ideas of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, monogamy, and identity. In a recent essay in Liberties, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Jamie compares the liberal tenets of the gay rights movement to the radical aspirations of what he calls “political queerness”: With its insistence that gay people adhere to a very narrow set of political and identitarian commitments, to a particular definition that delegitimates everything outside of itself, political queerness is deeply illiberal. This is in stark opposition to the spirit of the mainstream gay rights movement, which was liberal in every sense — philosophically, temperamentally, and procedurally. It achieved its liberal aspirations (securing equality) by striving for liberal aims (access to marriage and the military) via liberal means (at the ballot box, through the courts, and in the public square). Appealing to liberal values, it accomplished an incredible revolution in human consciousness, radically transforming how Americans viewed a once despised minority. And it did so animated by the liberal belief that inclusion does not require the erasure of one's own particular identity, or even the tempering of it. By design, the gay movement was capacious, and made room for queers in its vision of an America where sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to equal citizenship. Queerness, alas, has no room for gays. The victory of the gay movement and its usurpation by the queer one represents an ominous succession. The gay movement sought to reform laws and attitudes so that they would align with America's founding liberal principles; the queer movement posits that such principles are intrinsically oppressive and therefore deserving of denigration. The gay movement was grounded in objective fact; the queer movement is rooted in Gnostic postmodernism. For the gay movement, homosexuality was something to be treated as any other benign human trait, whereas the queer movement imbues same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with a revolutionary socio-political valence. (Not for the first time, revolution is deemed more important than rights.) And whereas the gay movement strived for mainstream acceptance of gay people, the queer movement finds the very concept of a mainstream malevolent, a form of “structural violence.” Illiberal in its tactics, antinomian in its ideology, scornful of ordinary people and how they choose to live, and glorifying marginalization, queerness is a betrayal of the gay movement, and of gay people themselves. In the podcast I refer to Jamie as “a man alone.” This isn't quite true. He has comrades out there, in particular older gay writers like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, who share many of his commitments and critiques. Generationally, however, Jamie seems more alone than they do, without a cohort of gay intellectuals of roughly his age who share his intellectual reference points, his liberalism, and his very specific experience of coming of age as a gay man and journalist in America when he did, at his specific point of entry to AIDS, the decline of print and rise of online journalism, and the political advance of gay (and more recently trans) rights. He's a man alone but also, if the premise of this podcast is accurate, a man alone who has been publicly articulating a set of feelings and arguments that is shared by many of his gay male peers, of various generations, but hasn't yet taken shape in the form of a political or intellectual reaction.Blake Smith is my first return guest to the podcast, having recently joined me to discuss Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu (the “it girl of the trans world,” as I called her). He is a recent refugee from academia, now living and working as a freelance writer in Chicago, writing for Tablet magazine, American Affairs, and elsewhere. At 35 he is only a few years younger than Jamie, but is the product of a very different set of formative biographical and intellectual influences. Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a suburb of Memphis, Blake's big coming out, as he tells the story, was less as a gay man than as the kind of academically credentialed, world-traveling, city-based sophisticate he has become. If Jamie's sense of loss is maybe something in the vicinity of what I proposed at the top of this post–that he went from being in the ultimately victorious mainstream of the gay rights struggle to being seen as a member of the privileged oppressor class, at best a second-class “ally” and at worst an apostate to the cause –than Blake's experience is less about any personal or political loss of status or standing than it is a variant of the venerable intellectual and literary tradition of pining for a scene or scenes from eras prior to your own. Think Owen Wilson's character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, who was magically transported back to Paris in the 1920s, the scene he'd always romanticized, only to fall in love with a woman from that era who herself romanticizes and eventually chooses to abandon him for another, earlier cultural moment, the Belle Époque scene of the 1890s. For Blake, the key era, maybe, was the brief post-Stonewall period before AIDS superseded all other concerns––so the 1970s, more or less– when gay male life was sufficiently out of the closet for a gay male public to come into existence and begin to define itself and understand how it related, or didn't relate, not just to the straight world but also to feminism, women, Marxism, black civil rights, and other left-wing and liberal movements. In a recent piece in Tablet, Blake writes about the magazine Christopher Street, founded in 1976, and its project of helping to bring into existence a coherent intellectual and cultural community of gay men:In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but [editor Michael] Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny's Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.For Blake, what's been lost or trumped is less the liberal politics that Jamie champions and that Christopher Street more or less advocated than the existence of a gay male world of letters that had fairly distinct boundaries, a relatively private space in which gay men–who may always remain in some way politically suspect, even reviled, by the mainstream–can recognize and talk to each other.  As he writes in another recent essay in Tablet, maybe half-seriously, “One should, …know one's own type (Jew, homosexual, philosopher, etc.) and remain at a ‘playful distance' from those outside it, with ‘no expectation of essential progress' toward a world in which the sort of people we are can be publicly recognized and respected. No messiahs, and no end to paranoias and persecutions—but, in the shade of deft silences, the possibility of cleareyed fellowship with one's own kind.”Jamie, Blake, and I had what I found to be a really exciting conversation about all these issues and more. Give it a listen.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 16, 2023 is: paladin • PAL-uh-din • noun A paladin is a leading champion of a cause, or a trusted military leader (as for a medieval prince). // The keynote speaker is regarded as a paladin of environmental justice. // The prince summoned the paladin and commended him for his actions in battle. See the entry > Examples: “This collection of stories by one of England's best novelists is both playful and serious in the manner of Laurence Sterne, the 18th-century author of ‘Tristram Shandy.' ... Sterne was the master of the marginal, the random, the inconsequential. In our own day, David Foster Wallace, Geoff Dyer and Ali Smith have become the paladins of this goofy manner.” — Edmund White, The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2016 Did you know? Rome wasn't built in a day, and we know the site where it was founded: Palatine Hill (known as Palatium in Latin), site of the cave where Roman legend tells us Romulus and Remus were abandoned as infants, nursed by a she-wolf, and fed by a woodpecker before being found by a herdsman. In ancient Rome, the emperor's palace was located on the Palatine Hill; since the site was the seat of imperial power, Latin palatium came to mean “imperial” as well as “palace.” From palatium came Latin palatinus, also meaning “imperial” and later “imperial official.” Different forms of these words passed through Latin, Italian, and French, picking up various meanings along the way, and eventually some of those forms made their way into English, including paladin and palace.

Writer/director/friend of the show John Butler (Handsome Devil! Papi Chulo! Amazon's The Outlaws!) makes a return appearance from a similarly rainy Dublin, for a conversation that goes to unexpected, beautiful and nameless places. Along the way, we dive into: standup specials, Colm Toibin, Bronski Beat, Heartstoppers, Barbarian, Edmund White, being along vs. being lonely, a unique and rarely-discussed form of queer love and grief, the special magic of Irish Sea, and, you know, GOD.

Author and Literary Hub Managing Editor Emily Temple and Lit Hub Associate Editor Katie Yee join hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about Lit Hub's 38 favorite books of the year as chosen by the staff. The list spans genres from historical to memoir to post-digital post-capitalist manifesto to lesbian Sasquatch novel. Each editor reads a selection from a favorite, Temple from St. Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber and Yee from The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka.   To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf. Selected Readings: Emily Temple The Lightness  Katie Yee Others: Our 38 Favorite Books of 2022, Literary Hub Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5 Episode 26: “This is Such Bullshit.” Shelly Oria and Kristen Arnett on the Reproductive Rights Crisis Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1 Episode 4: Edmund White and Emily Temple on Literary Feuds, Social Media, and Our Appetite for Drama The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu St. Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber My Three Dads by Jessa Crispin Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly The Bond King by Mary Childs Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery Trust by Hernan Diaz Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin An Immense World by Ed Yong The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith Elderflora by Jared Farmer https://moonpalacebooks.com/browse/filter/t/kelly%20link/k/keyword Kelly Link Donald Barthelme Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka Earthlings by Sayaka Murata Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List ‹ Literary Hub Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special holiday episode of Shelf Life, we took time out from our regular format to see what  guests old and new read in 2022. The episode starts with Joyce Maynard, who shot to fame with her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, in which she wrote candidly about the traumatic relationship she had with the author of Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. But Maynard has also written many novels including Labor Day and To Die For, both made into acclaimed movies, as well as (more recently), Count the Ways.   After discovering what books found their way onto Joyce's reading list in 2022 we pose the same question to Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Flash Count Diary, among others, before rounding out the show with the legendary Edmund White, now 82, a pioneer in contemporary queer fiction (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty)  and still writing up a storm (a new novel is due in May 2023) and the irrepressible director, writer, and performer John Waters, a debut novelist himself in 2022 with Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance.

Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story: The Graphic Novel: Alessandro, Brian, Carroll, Michael, White, Edmund, Karash, Igor: 9781603095082: Amazon.com: BooksEdmund Valentine White III (born 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993. White's books include The Joy of Gay Sex, written with Charles Silverstein (1977); his trilogy of semi-autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997); and his biography of Jean Genet. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. White has also written biographies of three French writers: Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He is the namesake of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, awarded annually by Publishing Triangle. Pianist: Vadim ChaimovichSupport the show

You're listening to Lingo Phoenix's word of the day for June 5. Hot Air Balloon Day Today's word is people, spelled p-e-o-p-l-e. people /ˈpiːpəl/ verb [transitive] formal if a country or area is peopled by people of a particular type, they live there SYN inhabit Honolulu is peopled by native Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, white Americans, and others. The region has traditionally been peopled by Armenians. a science-fiction novel about a mission to people Mars The upper part of the valley is well peopled, and many of the hills are cultivated high up. — Scientific American, 20 Apr. 2020 Most of the floors had at least a few offices with the lights on, at least some of them peopled with executives trying to figure out what to do now. — Greg Jefferson, ExpressNews.com, 20 Mar. 2020 Both writers invented a place and, in novel after novel, peopled it with the same characters. — Edmund White, Harper's magazine, 6 Jan. 2020 With your word of the day, I'm Mohammad Golpayegani. We love feedback. If you want to email us, our address is podcast@lingophoenix.com, or you can find me directly on Twitter and message me there. My handle is @MoeGolpayegani. Thanks for listening, stay safe, and we'll see you back here tomorrow with a new word.

David is a political writer and former attorney who took on high-profile cases for religious liberty. He was also a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and before that he served as president of FIRE, the campus free-speech group. David now writes for The Dispatch and The Atlantic, and his latest book is Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. Last summer he wrote this wonderful review of my essay collection, Out On A Limb, but this is the first time we’ve spoken.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above. For two clips of my convo with David — on how many political Christians completely miss the point of Jesus, and on the “God gap” within the Democratic coalition — head over to our YouTube page.That convo is a good complement to our January episode with Christopher Rufo (the two have tussled before), so we just transcribed Rufo’s episode in full. Here’s a reminder of his stance on CRT in the schools:Starting around the 30-minute mark in the new episode, David and I discuss the tricky defense of liberalism in the face of both CRT curriculum and anti-CRT bills. We also grapple with the corrosive effects of Twitter and, in particular, the commentary surrounding the racist massacre in Buffalo this week. On that note, a reader writes:I am a member of a mainline Christian denomination and parent of young children. My personal and professional experience of social media is centered on connections with clergy colleagues and active church members attached to a wide variety of Christian denominations. When news of the racially motivated shooting in Buffalo broke, my social media relationships immediately shifted to a flurry of outrage, comments about the pox of racism built into the American way, and pithy memes noting that the root problem of all that ails us is white supremacy.For example, one friend wrote in response to the Buffalo shooting, “The root cause of gun violence is white supremacy. We will not be safe from gun violence until we end white supremacy. White fam, we are the ones who can end white supremacy. It is on us.” Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church released a statement decrying the racism behind the shooting. Members of my left-leaning church have asked and encouraged me to preach from the pulpit about the evils of white supremacy and white fragility, especially now in light of the Buffalo shooting. However, I did not hear a thing from these same people or religious bodies following the racially motivated shooting by Frank James on the NYC subway last month. Mr. James has been indicted on federal terror charges after shooting ten people. Were there no official prayers for victims and to end racial violence from religious bodies because no one ultimately died in the subway shooting? Why were there no tweets, memes, or impassioned calls to “do better” after such a horrific, calculated attack? The silence after that racially motivated shooting compared to the outcry after this month’s racially motivated shooting is noteworthy. And essential to the CRT worldview. Racism is unique to white people. Another sign of our racialized culture war comes from this listener:In your episode with Douglas Murray, you mentioned that you had to explain to someone how white people did not invent racism. I serve at the school board in Manhattan and we had the same discussion at our last meeting. The district is pushing a book called “Our Skin” to teach elementary kids how white people invented racism. Money quote:“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares.Here’s how Murray addresses the canard that white people invented racism:On a lighter note, here’s a fan of last week’s episode with Tina Brown:In your conversation about the Queen’s inscrutable nature and unceasing impartiality, you forget one spectacular lapse into utter bias: the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty!Pierre Brassard, a Quebec disc jockey, called Buckingham Palace impersonating the (then) Canadian PM Jean Chretien begging her to support the NO side and, astonishingly, got through to Queen Elizabeth! In the conversation, broadcast live in Montreal, she actually said, “It sounds as though the referendum may go the wrong (!) way...”. She said many other things that were blatantly against Quebec separating and was willing to make a public statement. Here’s the audio (and pardon Elizabeth R’s surprisingly bad French!): While I voted Non and thought the hoax was screamingly hilarious, this referendum was about the self-determination of a nation and she was hardly a glowing example of non-interference and impartiality. Quebec separatists were apoplectic. She wouldn’t even make a clear declaration in favour of the “No” side in the Scottish referendum! Ah, well ... even Captain Kirk broke the prime directive 33 times. Self-determination must be overrated. Here’s Tina on why the best British monarchs tend to be women:Another fan of the episode writes:So I’m a stereotypical NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Anglophilic liberal, happy to watch whatever B-grade pablum PBS airs on Sunday nights, as long as it has a British accent. So of course I fell in love with Downton Abbey. Part of my stereotypical outlook is holding a certain condescension toward the lower-class examples of American culture — you’d never catch me watching a soap opera, for example. But somewhere in the last season of Downton Abbey, it hit me full-on that the show is just a soap opera for snobs. That realization was a nice, bright, uncomfortable look in the mirror. What a hypocrite I am! That said, I can’t wait for the new Downton Abbey movie that opens this week:On the subject of Americans and their relationship with the British monarchy that you and Tina Brown discussed, to me it isn’t very complicated. It’s the embodiment of our cultural heritage, so it represents roots and stability in our land that values change and progress. And the monarchy is sacramental — another quality our society lacks, and which we’ve projected onto the office of the president as compensation. Toggling from listeners to readers, one of the latter writes:I have been thinking a lot about your May 6 column on the SCOTUS leak (“How Dare They!”) and the following week’s large number of reader responses to it. First, I want to say that, although I’m fiercely pro-choice, your column was strongly persuasive and helped me to think about Roe v Wade in a very different way. I love this about the Dish — the way you introduce complexity and nuance to issues that are polarizing and thus typically presented in stark black-and-white terms. But there is one potential detail of your argument that I continue to struggle with. While I accept that, in a liberal society, such issues as abortion should be a matter of debate and resolution via the popular voice, in practice they rarely are — because of the reality of our political system. Because of our two-party system and the primary elections that determine candidacy, most moderate, centrist voters simply do not have a choice to exercise their opinion on a wide variety of issues. They cannot vote individually on issues of substance, in an a la carte fashion. They are forced to accept a homogenous party platform that, in toto, represents the least worst of two extremes. For example, if I am a pro-choice moderate conservative who supports free markets, minimal government regulation, and low taxation, and is concerned about wokeness and CRT, my only choice to cast a vote in support of access to abortion is to vote for a candidate who is antagonistic to these other issues of import to me. You cite statistics in your column indicating broad support among Republicans for a moderate stance on abortion. Yet, I would argue that relatively few of these voters are going to voice that support by voting for a Democratic candidate — especially a far-left candidate — even if this means voting for the far-right opponent. This, then, is interpreted by the GOP as proof that their constituency supports the extreme view held by the majority of the GOP candidates. If we had a center party, I may be more optimistic in sharing your view of things. But as it stands, I feel like our choice is no choice at all.I feel you. But this is unavoidable in a democracy with political parties and winner-takes-all systems. Another reader has a few more laments:I believe anti-abortion-rights activists have not fully considered the consequences of how eliminating legal abortion will impact families. It is almost certain that the rate of child poverty in America will increase if a ban on abortion takes place.  Most of the states which want to ban abortion also have small child-welfare programs. That will result in more children being born into poor economic circumstances.Another thing that will probably happen is an increase in crime. The crime rate in the US has been falling since the early ‘90s, when kids born after Roe first started reaching adulthood. There is a clear link between kids being neglected and unwanted and then turning to crime. This was documented in the book Freakonomics.I believe the pro-choice side will win this debate. But perhaps it will only win when the full, horrifying consequences of banning all abortions — such as in the Oklahoma bill just passed — comes into focus. This next reader goes meta:In your otherwise excellent compilation of reader thoughts about Roe, you had one response I want to quibble with. After quoting one reader, you wrote: “Oh please. This next reader gets specific:” — and then went on with the next quote.I don’t recall what the first reader said, and it doesn’t matter because your response was inappropriate no matter what was said. If you think the reader’s argument has no merit, omit the comment. If you have a rebuttal to the reader’s argument, offer it. Even if you disagree with the reader but lack the time or energy to formulate a proper response, that’s fine too: Just print the comment with no response.What’s not OK, ever, is to reply with just a snarky dismissal and no further comment. That’s rude to the reader, and it makes you look like a dick.That whole big collection of reader dissents was compiled and edited by my colleague, Chris, who does that every week to hold my feet to the fire. I don’t censor the reader criticism he offers — so forgive me the occasional harrumph. Another reader switches topics:I read these two excerpts in your weekly money quotes:“There were also homosexual women at the Pines, but they were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and usually ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognizable as the men were,” - Midge Decter, who died the week, on Fire Island in the summer of 1980.“Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto,” - Gore Vidal, responding to Midge.I had known about Decter’s “The Boys on the Beach” essay for decades, maybe since the late ‘80s, but I had never read it — until a few months ago. I am 66 years old, was practically always out, loved to read all the gay literature, and I have to say, that essay got the pulse of ‘70s gay life and society better than Edmund White (his “States of Desire” was published in 1980 and I still have my copy) or any other commentator I know of, with the exception of Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On.”Decter had gay acquaintances, friends, and frenemies, and she saw aspects of gay life with a beady-eyed sharpness and skepticism I wish more of us had had back then. I remember when I officially came out in 1974 at 18, met a couple of good-looking guys in their late 20s/early 30s who, like the vast majority of gay men, talked about sex all the time, with a greater intensity than straight guys I knew. So I asked them how many guys they had been to bed with and they said maybe 500 or 600. Asked them if they were afraid of getting diseases, and they said “no” because they just went to the public health clinic to get a shot. And right there, I sensed that at some point, there would be a gay healthcare catastrophe. I was not the only who had that sense, but it was very censored in the community.I tend to agree about Decter’s accuracy and perception, however laced it was with disgust. It’s a riveting piece — proof that sometimes being alien to a subculture makes you a better observer of it. She and Larry Kramer were essentially on the same page when it came to gay male culture in the 1970s. And yes, the omens were there. And now there’s monkeypox, which seems as if it might have found the same transmission route as HIV. Gulp.Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Leyendo Pancha, así se llama la columna literata de Panchi Perez Lence en la que compartimos libritos. Hoy, llegó el turno de 'Historia de un Chico', de Edmund White.

How's this for fun? Take 27 incredible writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, PEN Awards, Women's Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more–and invite each of them to write an erotic short story. Then publish the collection in one steamy anthology with the authors listed alphabetically at the beginning of the book but none of the stories attributed, so nobody knows who wrote what. We're talking about authors Robert Olen Butler, Louise Erdrich, Julia Glass, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi. Mary-Louise Parker, Jason Reynolds, Paul Theroux, Luis Alberto Urrea, Edmund White, and more. The idea was the brainchild of authors Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, and the book is called Anonymous Sex. In this episode, Hillary and Cheryl join Julie and Eve to discuss the responses they got when they reached out to authors, how the freedom of anonymity allowed authors to write outside their own identities, and what surprised them most about the collection (“there is a lot of cunnilingus in this book”). Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family. She's also the editor of the fiction anthology, Singapore Noir. Cheryl was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, In Style, and The Baltimore Sun, and her stories and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and Bon Appétit, among others. Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke. Mudbound was an international bestseller that won multiple awards and was adapted into a critically acclaimed Netflix film that earned four academy award nominations. Hillary is also a screenwriter, essayist, and poet whose work has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney's, and Outside Magazine, among others. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to Book Dreams, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first interview today is with debut novelist Lizzie Damilola Blackburn about her book, Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? The protagonist Yinka is constantly being hounded by her family to get married. But Damilola Blackburn tells NPR's Sarah McCammon that learning to love oneself first can be important. The second interview is with award-winning writer Edmund White who is out with a new book about sex. A Previous Life follows a couple – they are writing to each other about their romantic pasts. White told NPR's Scott Simon that though the book might offend some, he has always written this way.

Derek McCormack is a small town pervert and the author of The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle F*ggot, both published by Semiotext(e). His most recent book is Judy Blame's Obituary. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."  Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young f*g in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.  In this Wake Island holiday special we talk about: my butthole, revealing the real Derek through writing about fashion, turning our ashes into jewelry, clothes as ectoplasm, Dodie Bellamy's “Kathy Forest,” Vivienne Westwood's imperial years, an outfit based on an advent calendar, sequins implantations, Margiela, being a small town pervert from Peterborough, our hometowns vs the hometowns of our minds, fistulas, Guy Maddin, the sadomasochistic beauty of being a writer, and we investigate - why does fashion abandon us?   Preorder Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death here.  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Additional music by TRG Banks  Follow us on social at:  Twitter: @WakeIslandPod     Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David's Twitter: @raviddice  Derek's Twitter: @HillbillyBijoux  Derek's IG: @derek_mccormack --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

“In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.” -Edmund White. Ancient Egypt and memoirs and your lasting legacy today. Join the author conversation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/inkauthors/ Learn more about YDWH and catch up on old episodes: www.yourdailywritinghabit.com

Une histoire de la lutte LGBT des années soixante à nos jours, après que l'étincelle des émeutes de Stonewall a embrasé l'action militante qui, de New York, devait se répandre partout dans le monde.De San Francisco à Paris en passant par Amsterdam, entre les premières Gay Pride, l'élection d'Harvey Milk, la « dépénalisation » française, l'épidémie du Sida et les premiers mariages homosexuels, ces quelques décennies de lutte s'incarnent au travers de nombreux témoignages d'acteurs et actrices de cette révolution arc-en-ciel.Avec la participation de : Bertrand Delanoë, Robert Badinter, Gérard Lefort, Dustin Lance Black, John Cameron Mitchell, Cleve Jones, Hervé Latapie, Lillian Faderman, Marie Kirschen, Didier Lestrade, Gérard Koskovich, Marie-Jo Bonnet, Edmund White, Jenny Bel'airBonus DVD :Autour de L'étincelle, avec Benoît Masocco (20')Entretiens : Robert Badinter (22') - Marie-Jo Bonnet (22') - Bertrand Delanoë (12') - Didier Lestrade (15')Biofilmographie de Benoît MasoccoAudio : VOST DD 2.0 - Sous-titrage : Français, AnglaisFormat TV : 16/9 Anamorphique - Format Cinéma: 1.78DVD Pal Zone 2

Edmund White, Godfather der amerikanischen Gay-Literatur, hat seine Memoiren geschrieben. "Meine Leben" ist jedoch alles andere als gediegene autobiografische Prosa, sondern erzählt von einer Existenz jenseits aller Bigotterie. Von Marko Martin www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Buchkritik Hören bis: 19.01.2038 04:14 Direkter Link zur Audiodatei

From 9/11 to Hurricane Sandy, we've seen New York weather many storms, the city an indestructible icon in our global imagination. But when COVID swept through Manhattan and surrounding boroughs, bustling restaurants, theatres, subways and sidewalks were forever changed. Renowned writer and photographer Bill Hayes has been hailed by Edmund White as “the great poet of the everyday”. When the world came to a halt, Bill took to the streets of Manhattan to document the lockdown. The resulting collection of poetry and images, How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic, is reminiscent of Insomniac City, Bill's tender ode to New York and his partner, the late Oliver Sacks. It celebrates the shared humanity that emerged during a time of unanticipated catastrophe. In this podcast episode, Bill shares anecdotes and experiences from during the pandemic and beyond with journalist Anton Enus. Please note, photographs from How We Live Now were shown during this special immersive event.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First broadcast on June 05, 1980. Edmund White talks about his book "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America," published in 1980.

If you were banished by your brother to a convent, how would you use all that “free” time? 12th-century Byzantine princess Anna Komnene put pen to paper to record her version of the family history in a 15-volume work, The Alexiad, modeled after the classic Greek epics she loved. We’ll give you the highlights of this Game of Thrones-rivaling family saga that Edmund White dubbed “an engaging document of a crucial era.”

di Matteo B. Bianchi | In questa puntata un po' anomala le letture di Matteo si riducono ma per una buona ragione: la presenza di due ospiti che di libri ne sanno davvero parecchio. Il primo è Giovanni Spadaccini, libraio "d'occasione" della libreria "Libri Risorti" (Reggio Emilia) e più di recente scrittore per Utet, con cui ha pubblicato "Compro libri anche in grande quantità". Lo spazio dedicato ai traduttori ospita Fabio Cremonesi, traduttore tra gli altri di Kent Haruf. Infine, torna il giornalista Daniele Cassandro per consigliarci una lettura tra le sue preferite. -Libri citati in questa puntataBREVE TRATTATO SUI PICCHIATORI NELLA SVIZZERA ITALIANA DEGLI ANNI OTTANTA di Manuela Mazzi, LauranaIl libraio d’occasione Giovanni Spadaccini, autore del memoriale "Compro libri anche in grande quantità" edito da Utet, e titolare della libreria "Libri risorti" di Reggio Emilia ci ha consigliato: MOBY DICK di Herman Melville, traduzione di Cesare Pavese, 1932 - Frassinelli (oggi pubblicata da Adelphi)IL CASTELLO di Franz Kafka, traduzione di Anita Roh (disponibile in Oscar Mondadori)JA di Thomas Bernard, GuandaIl traduttore Fabio Cremonesi tra i libri che ha tradotto ci ha suggerito:IN GRATITUDINE di Jenny Diski, NNInfine, il giornalista Daniele Cassandro ci ha consigliato:UNA SANTA DEL TEXAS di Edmund White, Playground

We're joined by John Kell (freelance journalist, PR rep for Chobani) to talk about why the pandemic inspired him to read more books featuring gay male characters, which he recently wrote about in a piece for Fortune. We discuss one of those books, Edmund White's Our Young Man, and why John felt somewhat ambivalent about its main character, a gorgeous male model who is trying not to age out of the industry. We also talk about what kinds of gay lives get represented in fiction, which fictional universes we'd like to see get COVID updates, and what it's like to make the move from journalism to public relations. If you like the show, and would like access to two bonus episodes each month--plus our entire backlog of bonus material--you can subscribe to our Patreon for just $5: https://www.patreon.com/BookFight  

It's a MASHUP!! Mary & Wyatt settle in for a chat about reproductive health & justice, life in the post-truth era, and how to feel grounded in a world where reality is under constant attack. In a sometimes stream-of-consciousness (but always rollicking fun) discussion, they also talk about why access to reproductive healthcare is a fundamental human right. Also on the agenda: scam-baiting, “The Amazing Race,” and poems by Edmund White and Tearisa Siagatonu. 

On Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning and Edmund White's A Saint from Texas

Several kinds of novels in one, Edmund White’s “A Saint from Texas” is so good you might forget a novel can be this good.

On this edition of The Weekly Reader, take a break from your everyday worries and get lost in a great book. Marion Winik reviews Edmund White's A Saint from Texas, and Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Virginia and Louise enjoy talking about some recent books with twins as central characters as well as some podcasts and movies they have been diving into.Email hello@divinginpodcast.comInstagram @diving_in_podcastVirginia’s Instagram @virginia_readsLouise’s Instagram @louise_cooks_and_readsSong ‘Diving In’ – original music and lyrics written and performed by Laura Adeline – https://linkt.ree/llauraadelinePodcast sound production and editing by Andy Maher.Graphics by Orla Larkin - create@werkshop.com.auBooksThe Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, 2020, Dialogue Books, Little, Brown Book Group.Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell, 2020, Tinder Press, Headline Publishing Group.A Saint from Texas, by Edmund White, 2020, Bloomsbury Books.Podcasts13 Minutes From the Moon, Series 1 & 2, BBC World ServiceWind of Change, Patrick Radden Keefe, Pineapple Street Studios, Crooked Media, SpotifyMoviesThe Burnt Orange HeresyThe Trip to Greece

Welcome to Book Club! For June, 2020, we read A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White. Up next: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (which will be discussed on July 15th, as an extra book club selection). Our Selection for July: Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender! Have book club questions or suggestions? Email us at wearedoingfine@gmail.com

This week: Robbie quizzes Lisa about Pride history, we discuss the pros and cons of visibility, the okay hand gesture, pandemic parties, and much more! Join us for book club! Our selection for June is A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White. We also have a secondary selection to support BLM: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (discussion will be on July 15). Find our book club selections at https://bookshop.org/shop/wearedoingfine Have a question, suggestion, or want a postcard? Email us at wearedoingfine@gmail.com

The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks.By Amy Azzarito Intro: Welcome to the number-one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Amy Azzarito: My name is Amy Azzarito. I'm a design historian living in the Bay Area, and my new book is Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the quarantine question round. Number one, where are you living?Amy Azzarito: I'm in Marin County, which is in the Bay Area, just north of San Francisco.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Amy Azzarito: I picked two. One is an omakase restaurant in San Francisco. It's the special occasion restaurant for my husband and myself called Sasaki. 10 people sit at a bar and watch the sushi chef make everything. It's one of those restaurants where they don't let you put your own soy sauce on things. Then the other is a restaurant here in Marin County called Guesthouse. They make these amazing ribs on Thursday nights that I've been missing.Suzy Chase: What dish is getting you through this that you're making at home?Amy Azzarito: Yeah, so Cooking Light has a recipe for, they call it Instant Pot Vegetarian Cassoulet, that I have made more times than I can count. Our stay at home has coincided with my one-year-old daughter developing into a real eater, a person who eats real food, so I'm cooking more than ever, and she loves this dish. I'm making it once a week. I'm making something with cannellini beans for her once a week if I can find them.Suzy Chase: Now on with the show. You are a sought-after expert on the topic of design history both past and present. We go through everyday life using napkins, forks, spoon, tablecloths, and even a punch bowl not even considering these items have a story and a history. My whole apartment here in New York City is filled with family heirlooms, and I love looking at history through the lens of objects. That is what this book is all about. Can you give us a short history of household objects?Amy Azzarito: Sure. In the introduction to the book, I explain that most of the objects in our home were conceived to fill some sort of a need, something to lie on, something to drink from, to sit on, but that doesn't mean that, just because they filled a practical void, that there wasn't an aesthetic consideration. Human beings seem drawn to beauty. When we consider the history of household objects prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, which is fairly recent, some of the things that we today deem essential, or many of the things, rather, so pillows and chairs and forks, the things that you mentioned, all of those things were handmade and available to a very few. This book looks at objects through that lens. What were things like? What was it like to live in that time period? What were the stories of these objects?Suzy Chase: The extensive bibliography in the back of the book is the roadmap of your journey, and it's extensive. Can you talk a little bit about the process of figuring out what items you wanted to include in the book and your research?Amy Azzarito: I came up with the object list in a few ways. I did spend time just noting the things that are ubiquitous in all homes, so mattresses, for example, and pillows. Then I'd see what was available on the history of that object and if it seemed like an Avenue that I could explore or if it was a dead end. Other times, I may have read something more general. I mention Joan DeJean's book on comfort. She writes about the history of the sofa in the context of a larger narrative. I thought the story of the sofa was so compelling that reading her take set me on a path to research more. With one hook like that, I would then look over those bibliographies, look for additional books, look for articles, dissertations, so just following the thread if I could.Suzy Chase: Talk a little bit about how the French pops up over and over in this book.Amy Azzarito: In the introduction, I was just trying to head off anyone complaining like, "Why is there so much French stuff here?" I do quote Edmund White who wrote that the French invented the idea of luxe and they have always been willing to pay for it. Beginning in the 16th century, there's a lot of money from French colonies, and the French spend that money and they spend it on... not just the kings but the aristocracy, and they spend it on food and clothing and decorative objects, and they're fashion-forward and they start trends. As this consumer market evolves, people makers, artisans, are enticing them to spend more. I mean it's like our economy, really, so there's always something new, new clocks, new style of silver. You certainly don't want to be seen with the outmoded, whatever that was. Then everybody is just trying to catch up for the next even... You could argue, even now, we're still looking to catch up to their aesthetics.Suzy Chase: Well, case in point, Versailles.Amy Azzarito: Right?Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh.Amy Azzarito: Yeah, yeah.Suzy Chase: Over the top.Amy Azzarito: I mean it's interesting because Versailles is not just a palace for one king like we think of it, the fairy stories, but it's actually like this giant sprawling apartment complex. All the nobility are living there. Everyone's there. In fact, a lot of them who have these amazing townhouses in Paris are called to be there at the behest of the French king. It's how he keeps an eye on them. They're crammed, sometimes, into small apartments, but it is crowded. They bring their servants and they bring their dogs, but they're all there together, so you have all these people with money all together all the time. They're bored. They're looking to spend their money. They're looking to outdo one another, and it just like... It's this explosion of style.Suzy Chase: Let's start off with the good-old fork.Amy Azzarito: Yeah.Suzy Chase: It's actually the first thing you wrote about for Design Sponge, a popular, now-defunct design blog that we all miss so much. You wrote, in the book, it was once considered immoral, unhygienic, and a tool of the devil. Many people, even aristocrats, preferred to eat with their hands. Can you tell us about the fork?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. Most people ate with their hands. Part of the reason that the fork is seen as this implement of the devil is the early fork looked like a pitchfork. It was a two-pronged implement. The idea was that God made your hands and your hands should bring the food to your body to feed your body, and that's what God intended and, by using something else, it's devilish. I mean it's hard to get back into a medieval mindset, but that was the logic. To me, what's fascinating about the fork is that everyone was fine eating with their hands, that that was working really well. There was a lot of ritual around hand-washing, so everybody was very clean and there was a trumpet that would blow and call you to the table to hand wash, and they would pour the water over your hand not dip your hand in the basin. It was a nice ritualized thing. Well, all of the sudden, there's more sugar, again from the colonies. Chefs create this way to preserve fruit in this sugar, and they make this sticky, syrupy fruit dessert, and people just go gaga for this.Suzy Chase: British food writer Bee Wilson pointed out that there are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures, but all people around world use spoons. In the old days, people wouldn't leave their home without their spoon, and what it was made of said everything about your social standing. Can you give us a little history of the spoon?Amy Azzarito: This time period, pre-Industrial Revolution, so anything before the 1850s, things, objects, everything, cloth, everything you wear, shoes, everything's made by hand, which means it's rather expensive. That's the reason you're carrying your own spoon around with you. It's not until we have more manufacturing they can afford to buy spoons for everyone. This is where we get the idea of... The concept of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth comes about this time as the spoon is a popular... silver spoon, rather, is a popular baptismal gift. It's basically just because it was the least expensive item of silver one could get, so that's sort of how that started, although if you were really wealthy, you might give a baby, say, 13 spoons that would have a little apostle on the finial of the spoon. Once we hit the 18th century, the problem isn't, "Do I have enough spoons?" Now that people can buy spoons, they want to have as many spoons as possible, and so, in the Victorian era, they have a spoon for everything.Suzy Chase: I didn't know that bread used to be the plate. Tell us about the trencher in the Middle Ages.Amy Azzarito: When you think about the medieval plate, we're thinking about a round slice of aged bread basically. That's what the early medieval plates were made of. There are recipes floating around online because these are aged, hard slices. They were aged for a few days so that they worked as a plate. We have these medieval plates, these trenchers, and the fork burst onto the scene, and people began eating all of their meals with this awesome new fork, and the fork pokes holes in the bread plate and the sauces run through, so bread doesn't really work as a plate. Then, as a stop-gap measure, people put maybe wood or something underneath the bread plate, so you have the bread plate then a... Finally, they're just like, "Forget it," and we get rid of the bread and we just have the plate.Suzy Chase: Can you talk about how, in ancient Rome, the wine glass was disposable?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. I think that's probably one of my favorite facts about the wine glass. The blow pipe had... which was a technique, a way to make glass, had just been invented in Syria, which was, at that time, part of the Roman Empire. We're talking like 50 BCE. All of a sudden, there's a plethora of glass. There's a lot of glass, and so if a Roman housewife chipped a glass, it was cheaper to just throw it away and buy a new one. That that kind of disposable mentality also existed in ancient life is fascinating.Suzy Chase: I've never put much thought into the napkin that I use at any given meal. In the book, you say this essential domestic item has surprising origins. Can you talk a little bit about that?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. This is one of my favorite facts from the book is that the earliest napkins were actually made of lumps of dough that were used by the Spartans. They would have a dough ball, and they would just kind of roll it and clean their oily fingers during the meal. Then, at the end of the meal, they would just, again, throw the dough to dogs or the poor people, and then that became a slice of bread that they would use as a napkin. Using a piece of dough would have been much less expensive than getting someone to weave and sew and make cloth to then use for napkins just to wipe your hands with.Suzy Chase: Why do you think medieval diners would be horrified by our casual attitude toward table linens?Amy Azzarito: Dinner and meal time and these dinner objects are so interesting because they are so ritualized, and they're symbolic, and they mean a lot to us, so having a bare table when you could afford to have cloth would have just not made any sense to them. It would have been behavior like a peasant.Suzy Chase: Tell us about Charlemagne's tablecloth party trick.Amy Azzarito: Charlemagne, just to remind everybody, he was the first emperor to rule over western Europe. We're talking about the year 755. He had tablecloths woven with asbestos and would throw it in the fire after a dinner, and the crumbs would burn off, but the tablecloth would remain intact.Suzy Chase: Oh, my God.Amy Azzarito: There are stories of Romans doing this, and so it's like there are... Is it true or not? Asbestos is apparently fireproof, and so the Greeks and Romans would use it as shrouds, and so it was used as a material, a cloth. They also knew that people who had the job of weaving it seemed to get really ill and die, but they kept using it.Suzy Chase: Yeah. Hello, lung cancer.Amy Azzarito: I know, right?Suzy Chase: But we don't care.Amy Azzarito: It was not a great time to be a human, quite possibly, because even if you're wealthy, you don't have air conditioning, you don't have electricity. Then, if you're not, you're a slave or you’re a peasant. Life was about survival.Suzy Chase: When I think about the punch bowl, I think about a cold beverage, but in the book you wrote, "The first versions of punch were always served hot." Can you talk a little bit about that?Amy Azzarito: When I think of punch, I think of something cold with sherbet in the middle, but yeah, the first punch comes from India, and it was served hot. You want to think about a mulled wine sort of thing. It was made to be drunk communally, but it was usually made with a liquor that needed a lot of spice and sugar to be palatable. It's initially drunk by sailors, but it just becomes the thing to drink in Britain in the 17th century because it's just cold, and so warming from the inside, and then getting a little tipsy or more and forgetting about your troubles was the thing to do.Suzy Chase: We just talked about a bunch of food-related objects, but there are many more types of objects in this book. Do you have a favorite?Amy Azzarito: I write about the mattress and about Henry VIII would have his attendant stab the mattress through every night to make sure there wasn't an assassin lying in there. We talk about the sofa and the chandelier and the jewelry box and the pillow. I don't know that I could pick a favorite, Suzy.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment, putting you on the spot again, called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Amy Azzarito: I am a digital subscriber of The New York Times and subscriber of the cooking section also. They had the amazing Melissa Clark, who's been a guest on your podcast.Suzy Chase: Yes.Amy Azzarito: She has a recipe I used to use years ago, how to make maraschino cherries. I learned how to do that via her column. I just have love for our papers right now. It's a hard time for them. I might have to just pick the paper. I know.Suzy Chase: That's fine.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Amy Azzarito: I am everywhere. Amy Azzarito, my first and last name, A-M-Y, A-Z-Z-A-R-I-T-O on Instagram. That's where I am most often.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks, Amy-Amy Azzarito: Thank you.Suzy Chase: ... for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Amy Azzarito: Thank you.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com, and thanks for listening to the number-one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

This week: We announce a second book club selection, discuss gross children, The Handmaid's Tale, customer service voices, the fog in Edinburgh and much more! Please join us for book club, this month we have TWO selections: A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Have questions, suggestions, or want to hear something in our accents? Email us at wearedoingfine@gmail.com https://bookshop.org/shop/wearedoingfine

This week: Robbie moves flats, Lisa talks about the hierarchy of need, we discuss the moment people take jokes too far, some old favorite internet videos, and the ongoing protests against police brutality and the unjust treatment of black people, and much more. Join us for book club, our (first) June selection is A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White. A second selection will be announced soon! Find this month's and previous month's book club selections at https://bookshop.org/shop/wearedoingfine Have a question, suggestion, or topic? Email us at wearedoingfine@gmail.com Looking to help fight police brutality and racial injustice but aren't sure where to start? Here's some links: https://blacklivesmatter.com/ https://unicornriot.ninja/ https://www.innocenceproject.org/

This week: We discuss the protests following the killing of George Floyd, ways to help, and how this tragedy is unfortunately not nearly the first of this nature. Stay safe out there. Also: Robbie is moving and Lisa doesn't understand Scottish meal times. Join us for book club! For June, we selected "A Boy's Own Story" by Edmund White. Have a question, suggestion, or would you like a postcard? Email us at wearedoingfine@gmail.com or slide into our DMs. Looking for a place to help? Follow these links to donate if you can: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd https://www.blackvisionsmn.org/ https://www.reclaimtheblock.org/home https://unicornriot.ninja/

Dal premio von Rezzori, dialogo tra Edmund White e Richard Powers

Dal premio von Rezzori, dialogo tra Edmund White e Richard Powers

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.“ - Blaise Pascal.The Quarantine Tapes is a week-day program from Onassis LA and dublab. Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, the series chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul Holdengräber calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.On today's episode, recorded April 8th 2020, Paul talks with singer, songwriter, author and daughter of Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash. “Time doesn't fly - it bounds and leaps - I keep thinking about that… Our sense of time is distorted. It particularly seems distorted right now. You know I know 7 people who have died in the last 10 days from the virus - 5 of them from the virus and 2 from old age. It seems like it's an avalanche of loss and it makes me feel that time is going too fast. You used to get time to process a loss and a death and it’s not happening right now.” - Rosanne CashPaul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator of public curiosity. He is the Founder and Director of Onassis LA (OLA), a center for dialogue. Previously he was the Founder and Director of LIVE from the NYPL, a cultural series at the New York Public Library, where he hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Christopher Hitchens to Mike Tyson. He is the host of "A Phone Call From Paul," a podcast for The Literary Hub.You can find Paul on Twitter: @HoldengraberOnassis LA is a center for dialogue in Los Angeles, and a part of the Onassis Foundation.DUBLAB is a non-profit radio station based in Los Angeles. Since 1999, DUBLAB has been broadcasting wide spectrum music from around the world daily. Their programming has expanded to include the production of original art exhibitions, films, record releases, education programs related to health, youth, development, education creative processes and events with leading institutions in LA and beyond. DUBLAB is a platform for discovery and cultivation of next - wave music, arts and culture. For over 20 years, DUBLAB’s fundamental goal has been to support the broad range of Los Angeles’ talent and diversity in inclusive and inspiring ways. DUBLAB also includes affiliate stations in Germany, Japan, Spain, and Brazil, with more than 300,000 international listeners who connect to our streams and podcasts every day.

Michael Langan is an accomplished editor and writing coach who intimately knows the ins and outs of the publishing industry. He's an author himself, and helps other writers elevate their creative writing and critical reading skills.   He's also an avid student of the literary movement – studying Cultural History for over 2 decades, holding a phD in Creative Writing, and teaching English Literature at Greenwich University, London.   Other than focusing on his own writing career and helping his coaching clients, Michael also works as the Arts Editor at a popular LGBTQ magazine in London – interviewing acclaimed novelists such as Edmund White and Tom Spanbauer.   In this episode Michael reveals how to use the editing process to improve your writing, as well as how he navigates the tumultuous world of publishing.   Episode Highlights   A deep-dive into the tumultuous rollercoaster of the publishing industry How Michael's found agents to represent his work His advice for promoting yourself as a freelance editor How Michael pushes through tough writing challenges His advice for dealing with rejection when you're pitching your book to publishers The biggest differences between e-publishing, self-publishing, and traditional publishing How to prepare yourself for the intense editing process after you've written your book His method for breaking down huge projects and setting realistic writing milestones Why it's critical for editors to balance tough love and empathy when working with writers How to break through writers block when you're struggling to write Why it's critical that an editor learn to balance tough love and empathy

Producer/Host: Gina Logue Guest: Dr. Will Brantley Synopsis: The English professor and co-editor of "Conversations with Edmund White" discusses the most honored contemporary American author and his groundbreaking work.

Edmund White has been a central figure in gay fiction since the nineteen-seventies. His trio of autobiographical novels captured decades of gay experience and the glory days of pre-AIDS gay culture. Now seventy-six, White says that “gay life has changed so much and as a novelist, the aesthetic has changed.” He talks to his former student, The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman, and reads from his new novel, “Our Young Man.” If you like what you heard, subscribe to THE NEW YORKER RADIO HOUR for free.

This week's episode features a great chat (if I do say so myself...) with playwright Chris Thompson about his love for a trilogy of autobiographical novels by Edmund White. I also talk about depictions of sex in art. That sounds exciting, doesn't it!  Links: Chris Thompson Edmund White T.C. Cannon Amber Mark Parcels

The Village People tell us that Key West is the key to happiness, but is it also the key to a literary legacy? Michael Carroll joins the show to talk about his new collection, Stella Maris: And Other Key West Stories (Turtle Point Press), and the role Key West has played in his life. We get into the pros and cons of being married to a literary titan (Edmund White, in this case) and how they're portrayed in each other's work, the value of short stories in the short attention span era (and his lament that young gay men don't read), growing up Southern Baptist and gay, whether his upbringing in Jacksonville means he is Florida Man (and whether Florida is The South or South-Ish), why he avoids hookup apps, the influence of Joy Williams on his writing and the sustenance he gets from Lana Del Rey, and how writing about gay sex helps him vent his political rage. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Novelist, memoirist, essayist and queer literary icon Edmund White joins the show to talk about his new memoir, The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury USA)! We get into how his implied reader has changed identities over the years, the differences between writing memoir, autofiction and imaginative fiction, the boom and bust of the "gay fiction" bookstore category, the challenges of his massive biography of Genet and how he navigated about French attitudes toward gossip, and having the gay version of a shotgun wedding. We also get into his HIV diagnosis in 1985, outliving what he thought was a two-year death sentence, and being crazy enough to take on a long-term writing project in the midst of it. In between, we get to his status as a blurb-slut, what it's like for him to write on a computer for the first time, the pressure to write for a gay audience and how The Flaneur opened him up to a very different reader, and more! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

In this episode of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, writers Edmund White and Emily Temple talk to hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about writers feuding with each other. Readings for the episode: ·      “25 Legendary Literary Feuds, Ranked,” by Emily Temple, Literary Hub.·      “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” by Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times.·      The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading by Edmund White·      Caracole by Edmund White·      The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch·      “Ta-Nehisi Coates Deletes Twitter Account Amid Feud With Cornel West,” by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times.·      “Perchance to dream: In the age of images, a reason to write novels,” by Jonathan Franzen, Harper's Magazine. (paywall)·      “Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it: A correction,” by Ben Marcus (paywall)  Guests:·               Edmund White ·               Emily Temple  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Gale's Kansas in August is a witty, warm novel of childhood and abandonment for listeners of Armistead Maupin and Edmund White. Musical-obsessed Hilary Metcalfe, abandoned by his lover Rufus on his birthday, gets drunk, discovers a baby and brings it home to his flat above a corner shop to provide comfort and company. Rufus, meanwhile, allows himself to be seduced by a frivolous young woman, who is actually Hilary's professional, high-powered sister, romancing under a pseudonym to escape the reality of her own loneliness. In this witty, bawdy slice of sex and lies, the trio will find themselves drawn together ever more tightly by the lures of hedonism, self-delusion and the inescapable desire to be needed.

From 1977’s “The Joy of Gay Sex” to his trio of autobiographic novels, “A Boy's Own Story” (1982), “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” (1988) and “The Farewell Symphony” (1997), to his revered biography of Jean Genet, novelist, memoirist and essayist Edmund White is undeniably a literary icon. And though he is perhaps best known for his writing on same-sex relationships, Edmund's newest work “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading” is a compendium of all the ways that other people’s books have shaped his writing and his life. Don’t miss Leonard's conversation with a writer whose work has meant so much to so many.

HOW WE GOT GAY tells the incredible story of how gay men and women went from being the ultimate outsiders to occupying the halls of power, with a profound influence on our cultural, political and social lives. After the battles over civil rights for African Americans, and equal rights for women, the battle over gay rights is the first great fight for freedom in the 21st century. It is succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, with the speed and breadth of the victory stunning its detractors and supporters alike. It is remarkable that the battle for gay rights in the Western world is advancing the battle over gay rights is the first great fight for freedom in the 21st century. It is succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, in a fraction of the time that it took the women’s movement and the civil rights movement to achieve similar goals. However, at the heart of the revolution is a tragedy. What drove the gay community to finally demand power was a disease that was decimating its ranks: AIDS. HOW WE GOT GAY tells the powerful story of the struggle for gay rights, from the 40’s and 50’s to the present day. It takes us inside the secret lives gay people were forced to live, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in every province in Canada and every state in America and police harassment was a fact of life. Using a rich mix of never before seen archival images and footage and candid interviews with activists and personalities including author Edmund White, and Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, the documentary explores what life was like for gay people at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness, and to be openly gay was to live in utter exile from society. With the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s, gays enjoyed a new found freedom. They also started to fight back. In 1969, the ‘Gay Revolution’ was unleashed with the Stonewall Riots, as an angry mob of gay people rose up against a routine police raid on a Greenwich Village bar. The film tells the devastating story of AIDS and its dramatic effect on the gay rights movement. What started as a barely noticed outbreak of a rare form of cancer in a small number of homosexual men in 1981 spread to become one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history. When AIDS is treated with indifference and hostility by society, the lack of response gives rise to a new kind of anger and a new kind of gay rights organization: the activist group ACT-UP. Through an extensive interview with AIDS activist Peter Staley, HOW WE GOT GAY shows how the movement for gay equality becomes consumed with the AIDS crisis, and how the gay community finally got the world’s attention. In the crucible of AIDS, the modern gay rights movement is born. By the year 2000, almost 500,000 people in North America have died of AIDS, but gay activists have also pushed for a drug regimen that has transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease. Through the work of groups like ACT-UP, AIDS finally forces the issue of homosexual equality, and it leads directly to the increasing embrace and acceptance of gay people into heterosexual society. HOW WE GOT GAY takes us into the gay rights movement of the 21st century. Now the movement has evolved into a powerful network of disciplined, top-down, media-savvy, Ivy League-staffed organizations that know how to operate the levers of power... Sourced From and description information From; https://youtu.be/foQrmKRUFgg Public Access America PublicAccessPod Productions #America #History #Podcast #Education #Not4Profit Footage downloaded and edited by PublicAccessPod Podcast Link Review us Stitcher: http://goo.gl/XpKHWB Review us iTunes: https://goo.gl/soc7KG Subscribe GooglePlay: https://goo.gl/gPEDbf YouTube https://goo.gl/xrKbJb

In search of some nostalgic holiday cheer, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell climb in the way back machine and time travel to 1997 with critic and editor Oscar Villalon and novelist Curtis Sittenfeld. Oscar rounds up the books that won prizes twenty years ago, the books that remain relevant, and explains why these books aren't always the same. Curtis talks to us about Monica Lewinsky, Esquire, The Prairie Wife, Sex and the City and the very literary politics of 1997. PLUS an *exclusive* preview of her novel-in-progress about a Hillary Rodham who never becomes a Clinton. Readings (Fiction): Underworld by Don DeLillo; You Think It, I'll Say It, by Curtis Sittenfeld; The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; American Pastoral by Phillip Roth; Paradise by Toni Morrison; Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser; The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald; The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White; Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling. Readings (Nonfiction): Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt; The Commissar Vanishes: the Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia by David King; The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang; The Women by Hilton Als; Sex and the City by Candice Bushnell. In the Stacks will be back in two weeks. Happy Holidays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer and performer Matt Lucas joins Josie and Robin this week ahead of the launch of his alphabetical autobiography Little Me. They chat about the process of writing memories plus stories of Little Britain, touring, comedy annuals and the work of favourite authors such as Douglas Adams, Edmund White and Michael Carson. Become a Patreon supporter of Book Shambles for as little as $3 a month and you'll get access to extended editions of all episodes, bonus episodes, competitions and much more. Head to http://patreon.com/bookshambles

When a renowned writer or artist dies, those left behind can find themselves in an ethical quandary - should work that is unfinished or incomplete be kept private or is there a public interest in revealing it to the world? Hunter Davies's wife, the author Margaret Forster, passed away last year, and left behind a substantial amount of unpublished writing. Hunter shares his story with us in the studio, and Virginia Woolf's great-niece and advisor to the Woolf estate, Virginia Nicholson, also joins us to discuss the issue.TV writer and part-time emergency room doctor Dan Sefton talks about his latest TV drama Trust Me, starring the future Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker. A psychological thriller about a nurse who takes drastic measures after losing her job, the four-part BBC series examines the many facets and layers of telling lies.The new Charlize Theron action spy thriller Atomic Blonde is not for the faint-hearted. Set in Berlin in the final days of the Cold War, the film features numerous very physical fight sequences - its director is a former stuntman and it shows. But does this approach offer more style than substance, threatening a good storyline? And with more and more of these movies fronted by women, are female action heroes becoming as bankable as their male counterparts? Film critic Anna Smith joins us to discuss.For Front Row's Queer Icons series, the Irish writer Colm Toibin nominates The Married Man by Edmund White.Presenter John Wilson Producer Rebecca Armstrong.

This week on BSDNow, we have an interview with Richard Yao, who will be telling us about the experience and challenges of porting ZFS to Linux. That plus the latest news and feedback is coming your way, on your place This episode was brought to you by Headlines Registration for MeetBSD 2016 is now Open (https://www.meetbsd.com/) “Beastie's coming home!” This year, MeetBSD will be held at UC Berkeley's Clark Kerr Campus November 11th and 12th, preceded by a two day FreeBSD Vendor/Dev Summit (Nov 9th and 10th) MeetBSD can be traced back to its humble roots as a local workshop for BSD developers and users, hosted annually in Poland since 2004. Since then, MeetBSD's popularity has spread, and it's now widely recognized as its own conference with participants from all over the world. The US version runs every two years in California since 2008, and now trades off with the east coast vBSDCon which runs on the odd years. “MeetBSD 2016 uses a mixed unConference format featuring both scheduled talks and community-driven events such as birds-of-a-feather meetings, lightning talks, hackable presentations, stump the chumps, and speed geeking sessions. Speakers are to be determined – stay tuned for more information!” Register before September 30th, and get $30 off Kris and I will be there, along with lots of other FreeBSD Developers, Vendors, and Users. MeetBSD's unconference style does a very good job of mingling users with developers and is one of my favourite conferences. *** Dual Booting FreeBSD and Windows UEFI (http://kev009.com/wp/2016/07/freebsd-uefi-root-on-zfs-and-windows-dual-boot/) Looking to install FreeBSD alongside Windows 10? What happens if that that system is pre-installed and UEFI? Well you could run TrueOS, but if that isn't your bag and you want vanilla FreeBSD we have you covered this week! Over on Kevin Bowling's blog, we have a detailed article showing exactly how to do that. First up, as prep you'll need to go into the Windows disk manager and shrink your existing NTFS partition. You'll need to next boot FreeBSD 11 or later. From there the walkthrough takes us through disk partitioning using gpart, and setup of ZFS into a boot-environment friendly layout. Once you get through the typical FreeBSD setup / extraction, the tutorial gives us a nice bonus, showing how to setup “rEFInd” for a graphical boot-menu. A great walkthrough, and hopefully it encourages others to try out dual-booting “EFI-style”. *** ZFS High-Availability NAS (https://github.com/ewwhite/zfs-ha/wiki) Interested in a DiY HA ZFS NAS? Edmund White (ewwhite on github) has posted a very detailed look at how he has custom-rolled his own Linux + ZFS + HA setup. Most of the concepts are already ones used in various other HA products, but it is interesting and informative to see a public detailed look at how ZFS and HA works. In particular this setup require some very specific hardware, such as dual-port SAS drives, so you will have to pre-plan according. The only bummer is this is a ZFS on Linux setup. Maybe this can serve as the guide / inspiration for somebody in our community to do their own FreeBSD + HA + ZFS setup and blog about it in similar detail. *** First public release of chyves - version 0.1.0 (http://chyves.org/) As bhyve continues to mature we are seeing tooling evolve around it. Enter ‘chyves' which started life as a fork of iohyve. We are looking to do an interview with the author in the near future, but we still want to bring you some of the new features / changes in this evolution of bhyve management. First up, nearly every function from iohyve has either been re-written in part or full. Among the new features, a full logging system (master and per-vm logs), multiple pool configurations, properties stored outside of ZFS (for speed) and self-upgrading. (Will that work with pkg'd version?) In addition to the above features, the website has a large chart showing the original ‘iohyve' commands, and how that usage has changed moving to chyves. Give it a spin, let the author know of issues! *** Interview - Richard Yao - ryao@gentoo.org (mailto:ryao@gentoo.org) Sr. Kernel Engineer at ClusterHQ - Major Contributor to ZFS on Linux News Roundup ZFS Deadlock: 'Directory of Death' (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2016-July/049740.html) A user reports that when they try to install npm (the Node.js package manager), their system deadlocks It turns out, this was also hitting the FreeBSD package building machines PR 209158 (https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=209158) The problem was a race condition in the way renames are handled in the FreeBSD VFS vs how ZFS does them internally This bug has existed since the original import of ZFS, but some other change caused it to happen much more frequently “ZFS POSIX Layer is originally written for Solaris VFS which is very different from FreeBSD VFS. Most importantly many things that FreeBSD VFS manages on behalf of all filesystems are implemented in ZPL in a different Way. Thus, ZPL contains code that is redundant on FreeBSD or duplicates VFS functionality or, in the worst cases, badly interacts / interferes with VFS.” “The most prominent problem is a deadlock caused by the lock order reversal of vnode locks that may happen with concurrent zfsrename() and lookup(). The deadlock is a result of zfsrename() not observing the vnode locking contract expected by VFS.” The fixes have been merged to the 10.x and 11.x branches *** New BSD Magazine out (2016-07) (https://bsdmag.org/download/implementing-memory-cache-beast-architecture/) Articles include: Implementing in-memory cache in the BeaST architecture, Docker Cleanup, FreeNAS Getting Started Guide, and starting at the very beginning with open source The August issue is also out (https://bsdmag.org/download/minix-3-free-open-source-operating-system-highly-reliable-flexible-secure/) This issue features two articles about MINIX 3, continues the FreeNAS getting started guide, Optimizes the in-memory cache for the BeaST architecture, and talks about fixing failed ports for Hardened and LibreBSD We hope to have an interview with the creator of the BeaST architecture in the coming weeks *** DragonflyBSD and UEFI (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2016-July/270796.html) We've featured a few stories and walkthroughs about using UEFI to dual-boot BSD, and now its Dragonfly BSD's turn. Dave McFarlane writes into the DF mailing lists, telling us about the specific steps taken to get UEFI installed and boot-strapped on his system. If you've done a FreeBSD manual UEFI install, the process looks very similar, but you will end up manually running ‘gpt' to create partitions, installing dist files, and eventually installing boot1.efi into the FAT EFI partition. Dave also ran into an issue with resulted in no /etc/fstab being present, and helpfully includes what his system needed to fully boot hammer properly. Somebody should document this fully for DFLY, since I would expect to become more commonplace as commodity hardware is shipped with UEFI on by default. *** Netflix and Fill (http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/08/netflix-and-fill.html) The Netflix team has produced a technical blog post describing how their OpenConnect appliances work First the content is received from the content provider, and the Netflix content team makes it ready for deployment, by transcoding the various bitrates, packaging the subtitles, etc. The finished files are then pushed to Amazon S3 storage “We deploy the majority of our updates proactively during configured fill windows. An important difference between our OpenConnect CDN and other commercial CDNs is the concept of proactive caching. Because we can predict with high accuracy what our members will watch and what time of day they will watch it, we can make use of non-peak bandwidth to download most of the content updates to the OCAs in our network during these configurable time windows. By reducing disk reads (content serving) while we are performing disk writes (adding new content to the OCAs), we are able to optimize our disk efficiency by avoiding read/write contention. The predictability of off-peak traffic patterns helps with this optimization, but we still only have a finite amount of time every day to get our content pre-positioned to where it needs to be before our traffic starts to ramp up and we want to make all of the OCA capacity available for content serving.” The OCA may actually contain more than one copy of the same video, because each disk in the OCA is independent, storing the same video on two different disks will provide twice the available read bandwidth Normally the filesystem cache would obviate the need for this, but the Netflix OCA has so much storage, and not a lot of memory, and the requests from users are offset enough that the cache is useless “OCAs communicate at regular intervals with the control plane services, requesting (among other things) a manifest file that contains the list of titles they should be storing and serving to members. If there is a delta between the list of titles in the manifest and what they are currently storing, each OCA will send a request, during its configured fill window, that includes a list of the new or updated titles that it needs. The response from the control plane in AWS is a ranked list of potential download locations, aka fill sources, for each title.” “It would be inefficient, in terms of both time and cost, to distribute a title directly from S3 to all of our OCAs, so we use a tiered approach. The goal is to ensure that the title is passed from one part of our network to another using the most efficient route possible.” The article then goes on to explain how they calculate the least cost filling source “Now that Netflix operates in 190 countries and we have thousands of appliances embedded within many ISP networks around the world, we are even more obsessed with making sure that our OCAs get the latest content as quickly as possible while continuing to minimize bandwidth cost to our ISP partners.” *** Beastie Bits: Cover reveal for “PAM Mastery” (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2734) LibertyBSD 5.9 is out - looking for mirrors (http://libertybsd.net/download.html) Unix for Poets (https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/lec/124-UnixForPoets.pdf) Feedback/Questions Chuck / Ingo - Get Involved (http://pastebin.com/ksq0rfph) Oskar - Thanks (http://pastebin.com/YqzcHEMg) Alex - SMF (http://pastebin.com/WvdVZbYc) Raymond - RPI3 (http://pastebin.com/JPWgzSGv) ***

The flaneur – an almost invariably male idler dawdling through city streets with no apparent purpose in mind – is familiar to us from the works of Baudelaire, Benjamin and Edmund White. In a glorious blend of memoir, cultural history and psychogeography, Lauren Elkin investigates the little-considered female equivalent, from George Sand to Agnes Varda and Sophie Calle, leading us through the streets of London, Tokyo, Venice, New York and, of course, Paris. Lauren Elkin, a contributing editor at the White Review, discussed the phenomenon of the flaneuse, and her own walking life with Brian Dillon. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Thomas Meaney on death (and what to do with the remains) in the West; Professor Amy Knight on how Putin keeps getting away with murder; Edmund White reconsiders Pale Fire, Nabokov's "great gay comic novel", and reads from the novel's opening. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Spend an hour with Garth Greenwell! Listen to him tell you the ins and outs of his book "What Belongs To You," declared a masterpiece by Edmund White. Get ready for a sizzling hour!

Terrence Rattigan's post-war classic Deep Blue Sea opens in a new production at London's NationalTheatre; dealing with need, loneliness and long-repressed passion. Directed by Carrie Cracknell with Helen McRory as Hester Fire At Sea is the Italian documentary which won The Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film festival. Set on the Sicilian Island of Lampedusa, it examines the lives of the locals and the migrants who land there. Edmund White's novel Our Young Man is a work of gay fiction set in the world of modelling in 1980s New York, with an apparently-ageless central character and the spectre of AIDS on the horizon. Dulwich Picture Gallery is staging an exhibition of the works of early 20th century painter British Winifred Knights We consider a couple of recent supernatural/horror TV dramas - Outcast and Preacher. Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Bidisha, Shahidha Bari and David Benedict. The producer is Oliver Jones.

In which Alan, John and Jen discuss Helen Macdonald's Costa Award-winning memoir H Is For Hawk (2014), as well as a slew of other autobiographical writings, both real and imagined. Along the way we chat about Bob Dylan, Carrie Brownstein, Edmund White, John Porcellino and Kanye West. From John Porcellino's Perfect Example: http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380359337i/710397.png

The Guests: Laurence Wooster: Science Fiction Writer and aficionado, Rap Artist and nerd extraordinaire Oscar Prado: Rap Artist The Books: “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke, “Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction” by Orson Scott Card, Margaret Atwood, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “All the Pretty Horses,” by Cormac McCarthy, “Game of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, “The Flaneur” by Edmund White, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “Infinite Jest” David Forster Wallace, “No le Temas a la Montana” by Dicxon Valderruten, “Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey, “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt, “Modern Romance” by Aziz Ansari, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Alex Haley and Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo, “Buffalo Lockjaw” by Greg Ames The Music: Star Wars Main Title performed by London Symphony Orchestra and “The Facebook Song,” by Locust Crew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ9HVLSCIW0 Writing: (from Laurence) Get the first draft out,put it down, knowing you will change a lot. Just get it done. Also build your “sounding board” community. Undiscovered Countries https://www.facebook.com/undiscoveredcountries/?fref=ts #inkandworm #rfb #starwars #writing #rap #nerd #fantasy #scifi #selectivereading #collections #books #reading

« J'ai interviewé Truman Capote pendant que Robert Mapplethorpe nous photographiait… » Romancier, biographe et critique littéraire américain, Edmund White est un acteur et témoin incontournable de la scène artistique newyorkaise ainsi qu'un chroniqueur engagé des combats de la cause gay. Ce francophile averti (auteur de biographies de Proust et Genet) a bien connu l'homme comme le photographe Robert Mapplethorpe.

For all our international listeners, the interview with Edmund starts at 04.10. I veckans Bögministeriet har Robin träffat kanske den mest legendariska gayförfattaren of all time, Edmund White som bland annat skrivit ”En pojkes egen historia” ”Genet: A biography” och ”The joy of gay sex”. De pratar om att Edmund tycker att bögarna blivit borgerliga och har dubbelmoral, hur det är att ha levt med HIV sedan 1985 och självklart blir det en hel del prat om sex och hans litteratur. Efteråt pratar Robin, Johan och Thomas om intervjun och Edmunds liv. Missa inte! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Anton Tjechovs pjäser återkommer ständigt på teaterrepertoarerna, något som är tydligt på de svenska scenerna i höst. På Dramaten spelas Måsen och Tre systrar, Folkteatern i Gävleborg sätter upp Körsbärsträdgården och i helgen var det premär för Onkel Vanja på Uppsala stadsteater. Lyckas uppsättningarna blåsa nytt liv i dramerna? Och varför spelas Tjechov igen - och igen? Kritikens programledare Anneli Dufva har bjudit in Lars Ring, teaterkritiker på Svenska Dagbladet och Maria Edström och Jenny Aschenbrenner från Sveriges radios kulturredaktion, för att diskutera hur den ryske dramatikerns klassiker förvaltas och utvecklas. Dessutom, kulturkorrespondent Roger Wilson intervjuar författaren Edmund White, Sverige-aktuell på festivalen Stockholm literature, om kritik och kulturredaktionens konstkritiker Mårten Arndtzen kommer till studion för att tala om den amerikanske konstnären Jeff Koons, ett av huvudnumren på den aktuella skulpturutställningen på Moderna Museet i Stockholm. Producent Maria Götselius

Des photos et des mots : Edmund White raconte Robert Mapplethorpe Entretien d’Edmund White avec Jérôme Neutres, commissaire de l’exposition. « J’ai interviewé Truman Capote pendant que Robert Mapplethorpe nous photographiait… » Romancier, biographe et critique littéraire américain, Edmund White est un acteur et témoin incontournable de la scène artistique newyorkaise ainsi qu’un chroniqueur engagé des combats de la cause gay. Ce francophile averti (auteur de biographies de Proust et Genet) a bien connu l’homme comme le photographe Robert Mapplethorpe.

An exciting first for Bookworm, recently married literary-couple Michael Carroll and Edmund White join us for a double-interview.

Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris (Bloomsbury Publishing) From the celebrated author of The Flaneur and City Boy, comes a fabulous new memoir from the iconoclastic Edmund White. When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he'd made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he'd come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.The book's title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It's a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.Edmund White is the author of two previous memoirs, My Lives and City Boy, and a previous book on Paris, The Flâneur. His many novels include the autobiographical A Boy's Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes & His Friend. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. 

Marie Lundström träffar Julie Otsuka i New York och vår kulturkorrespondent Roger Wilson dricker te med Edmund White i samma stad. Vi pratar också om dressyr och hästmetaforer med Gertrud Hellbrand och funderar högt om medeltida läkekonst för hemmabruk tillsammans med författaren och läkaren Bea Uusma. Den stillsamt humoristiska amerikansk-japanskan Julie Otsuka vann många läsares hjärtan med sin förra bok Vi kom över havet. I sin nya roman fortsätter hon att berätta om delar av den amerikanska historien som det varit tyst om länge. I När kejsaren var gudomlig följer vi kvinnan som i likhet med tusentals andra japaner efter Japans attack mot Pearl Harbor 1941 interneras i läger mitt ute i den amerikanska öknen. Marie Lundström träffar Julie Otsuka i New York. I samma storstad lever och verkar den nu 74-årige Edmund White som vår kulturkorrespondent Roger Wilson intervjuar. White, som också varit verksam som litteraturkritiker och lärare i kreativt skrivande, är sedan lång tid tillbaka en förgrundsgestalt i HBTQ- världen, inte minst tack vare sina, ofta sjäkvbiografiska, romaner om homosexuell kärlek. I sin senaste bok minns han ett glamouröst 80-tal i Paris. I veckans program bjuder vi också in läkaren och författaren Bea Uusma för att titta lite närmare på en bok om medeltida läkekonst: i Ardernes practica kan man lära sig hur man behandlar både yxhugg i benet och finnar på näsan… Dessutom tar vår reporter Jenny Teleman med sig Gertrud Hellbrand, aktuell med romanen Veterinären,  in i radions ljudarkiv för att försöka förstå vad hästar och människor har gemensamt. Programledare: Marie Lundström Producent: Lisa Bergström/Elin Claeson

Author of Jack Holmes and His Friend.

Can a gay man and a straight man be friends? Edmund White explores the gay-straight axis in Jack Holmes & His Friend.

Kenneth Branagh dicusses his Oscar nomination and Edmund White talks about his new book. Novelist Andrew Miller on winning the 2011 Costa Book Prize and poet Paul Farley reviews a film on rhyming couplets. Film maker Norma Percy discusses the story of Vladimir Putin's secretive Russia. And a review of the exhibition Hajj: A Journey to Islam.

With Mark Lawson. Suzanne Moore reviews the Oscar-tipped George Clooney in The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne, who made the Academy Award winning comedy Sideways. In a candid interview, author Edmund White discusses his life and work as his new novel is published. This week sees the start of three new series following members of the medical profession. Mark meets Dr Ben Allin from BBC Three's Junior Doctors and Mr Mark George, veteran of the original 1980s Horizon series Doctors to Be, to find out how the filming process has changed. As Jean Vigo's barge-set classic film L'Atalante is re-released, critic and houseboat dweller Antonia Quirke reveals why it still makes waves almost 80 years after it was made. Producer Stephen Hughes.

Författaren Edmund White har under snart 40 år skildrat situationen för homosexuella i USA. Nattligt sexraggande på pirerna i New York på 70-talet. Upproret på gaybaren Stonewall - där homosexuella för första gången slog tillbaka mot polisens trakasserier. Besöken på sjukhusen där vänner och älskare dör i aids. Tre scener från Edmund Whites romaner - och liv. 71 år gammal tillhör White generationen som upplevt alla stadier i resan från homoförtryck till frigörelse. Hans liv bildar stoffet till både romaner och memoarer - från det självbiografiska genombrottet En pojkes egen historia, till hans nya bok Jack Holmes and his friend. Stefan Ingvarsson och Roger Wilson har besökt White i hans hem i New York för att prata om förtryck, dekadens och litteratur med livet som insats. Här kan du läsa mer om Edmund White: http://www.edmundwhite.com

Edmund White, Thu, Feb 10 at 6:30pm from BAMCafe, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Moderated by Michael Greenberg. An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story, a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud, a previous memoir, My Lives , and most recently, City Boy. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.

On Saturday, May 26, "The Writers Studio Reading Series" celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yale Review, with authors who have some connection to the quarterly. The lineup of authors, including Louise Glück, Caryl Phillips, Edmund White and Michael Cunningham, read from their works at Le Poisson Rouge. All of the readers—with the exception of Edmund White, who has been published in the journal—teach at Yale. The writers were introduced by J.D. McClatchy, the current editor of the Review, who discussed the journal's impressive and colorful history as well as the difficulty small magazines face in the Internet age. “The literary quarterly is a threatened species,” he observed. However, if the packed room was any indication of the future of the Yale Review, McClatchy has nothing to fear. J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, on the written word online versus in print: "I think that if writers had the choice between elegant paper and a beautifully printed piece or [being published] online and having thousands of more readers, I suppose they would answer that they want both." McClatchy on Robert Frost: "Robert Frost was a long-time contributor to the Yale Review and once wrote to the editor complaining about the $10 fee that he was paid for one extraordinary poem after another. 'Could he get more money?' The editor wrote back and said, 'No, this is going rate.' And Frost wrote back and said, 'Well, I regret your decision, but I’d rather be published in the Yale Review and make less money then be published elsewhere and make more.'” Caryl Phillips, Yale professor and author of "In the Falling Snow," on the pleasures of writing fiction: "One of the nice things about being a writer of fiction is that one is able to hide. Hiding one's personal life, hiding the tracks and the footprints that have led you to where you are now always seems to be one of the few pleasures of writing fiction. You can disappear, be offstage." Edmund White, Princeton professor and author of "City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s" on reaching out: "My new best friend is John Irving and he just sent me his book and it’s all about being gay—and mine has all these daring straight scenes. Well, at a certain age, I guess you have to start reaching out."

Location: Supper Club. Question: What???s up with dressing down? Stroili and Sterling humorously discuss the lack of good taste in clothes when going out on the town. Television and theatre stars Mike Farrell (M*A*S*H), and Jim Parrack (HBO???s True Blood) are interviewed about their careers and starring together in famed fiction writer Edmund White???s hit drama Terre Haute at Hollywood???s Blank Theatre Company. The weekly live Arts Calendar highlights three productions. Sterling reviews recording artist Roslyn Kind in concert at Catalina???s Bar and Grill in Hollywood. Farrell and Parrack reveal their most embarrassing theatrical moments. Sponsored by Breakdown Services (http://www.breakdownexpress.com/)

Did Stephen Crane attempt to write a gay companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Literary rumor says he tried. At any rate, now Edmund White has written it for him. 

James McCourt, Camille Paglia, Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White James McCourt discusses the emergence of "queer identity" and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism, while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White explains how he has turned away from the aesthetic and has embraced social realism in his desire to document the AIDS crisis.

Edmund White turns himself into Mrs. Trollope, the Victorian traveler who, in her last year, narrates a biography of her scandalous friend, the feminist Fanny Wright....

This final book of Edmund White's trilogy about gay life in New York provides gossip, tragedy and, of course, brilliant writing. 

The author traces his fiction-writing career from the artistic aspirations of Forgetting Elena to the sexual politics of The Beautiful Room is Empty.

Edmund White's biography reopens the questions of aesthetics and criminality in the life of French writer Jean Genet.