The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

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‘I find it impossible to imagine anyone better read than White … Wisdom and a certain kind of tenderness are to be found on every page’ - Observer

‘One of the great prose stylists of our time … There are few paragraphs that pass by without an illuminating, wise or funny comment’ - Tim Smith-Laing, Daily Telegraph

‘A rallying cry for the pleasures of reading … The best writers are energetic readers, constantly diving for buried treasure. Anyone who encounters this book is likely to emerge with something new and gleaming’ - Financial Times ______________

Edmund White made his name as a writer, but he remembers his life through the books he read. For White, each momentous occasion came with books to match: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality; the Ezra Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of Stephen Crane that inspired one of White’s novels.

White’s larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world’s best-loved cultural figures. Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a sensitive, smart account of a life in literature.