© Dan Callister
Edmund White (1940–2025) was the author of many novels, including the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud; as well as memoirs, short stories, and criticism. In 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex. He was an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
We remember the transformative gay writer and celebrate Pride month with a trio of queer stories of love and lust.
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 the Poured Over Podcast 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.
“Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.
Edmund White
Foreword by Garth Greenwell
The letters of a seducer to the great love of his life, a sensual tour-de-force by “the paterfamilias of queer literature” (New York Times).