A Nocturne for Edmund White
Edmund White © Dan Callister
We remember the transformative gay writer and celebrate Pride month with a trio of queer stories of love and lust
Dear readers,
Last week, we lost a literary lion: Edmund White, whose audaciously sensuous and bracingly honest writing shaped generations of queer literature. In novels, memoir, and criticism, he stood for beauty, desire, and the right to speak openly about both.
Last summer, we had the honor of reissuing Ed’s second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Originally published in 1978, Nocturnes is a stirring elegy for a lost lover and a vanished New York. Garth Greenwell, in his foreword to our edition, writes, “White’s disarmingly gorgeous prose everywhere works transformations: on just the first page, the rotting industrial warehouse the men populate becomes a theater, a museum, a cathedral, a bird . . . Banal gestures become lavishly, ravishingly beautiful, making drama of perception.”
We were fortunate to bring Ed and Garth together with Miwa Messer, host of Barnes and Noble’s Poured Over podcast, for one of the last live interviews Ed recorded. In it, he reminisces on Nocturnes: “I believed I really was an avant-garde writer, so I wrote this kind of dreamy, erotic, religious book.” Watch the interview here.
For more on Ed and his legacy:
The New York Times: His obituary hails Edmund White as “a grandee of the New York literary world for more than half a century”
Document Journal: Editor Ira Silverberg memorializes Ed and calls Nocturnes a “foundational text . . . a lush, dreamy, romantic, elegy”
Substack: Garth Greenwell’s moving personal remembrance of Ed
We’re grateful to have had the chance to re-publish this luminous novel in Edmund White’s lifetime and invite you to rediscover it as well.
A Special Offer for Pride Month
We’re celebrating Edmund White’s legacy with three stories that explore unbridled passions.
In honor of Edmund White and Pride month, we’re pairing Nocturnes for the King of Naples with two recent reissues of overlooked queer classics of love and lust: Brigid Brophy’s delightful romp across Europe in search of a romantic obsession, The King of a Rainy Country, and John Broderick’s darker exploration of lust and Catholic guilt, The Pilgrimage. Read on to learn more, and get all three books, plus a McNally Editions tote bag, for $50.
The King of a Rainy Country
Brigid Brophy
Foreword by Stacey D'Erasmo
A delightful, queer quest for love, and a comic jaunt across Europe that’s “sharp, funny and clever, and fresh as new paint” (The Times).
“Part of Brophy’s brilliance is that the queerness doesn’t seem suppressed or coded; instead, it seems to be so much part of the way things are that it hardly needs separate mention . . . Her style [is a] revelation.” —Stacey D’Erasmo, from the Foreword
The Pilgrimage
John Broderick
Foreword by Colm Tóibín
An erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature.
“What Broderick is attempting is a French novel set in an Irish town; he wishes to put dangerous liaisons into the Irish midlands, to allow his Irish characters the freedom to pray to God for their eternal souls and then get into a state of mortal sin with agility and ease.” —Colm Tóibín