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A Boy's Own Story / The Beautiful Room is Empty
A Boy's Own Story / The Beautiful Room is Empty Author:Edmund White Two Books in One. — A Boy's Own Story — An instant classic upon its original publication. A Boy's Own Story is the first of Edmund White's highly acclaimed trilogy of autobiographical novels that brilliantly evoke a young man's coming of age and document American gay life through the last forty years. — This deeply aff... more »ecting work introduces the nameless narrator as he reflects on his difficult childhood during the 1950s with a mixture of tenderness and anguish. Growing up with emotionally aloof, divorced parents, and forced to endure ridicule from his unrelenting sister and schoolmates, he tries to escape his feeling of self-consciousness and alienation by immersing himself in literature, art, and his fantastic imagination. As he strives to cultivate enduring friendships with both peers and mentors, he becomes aware of his yearning to be loved by the men in his life, and struggles with the guilt and shame of accepting who he is. Written with lyrical delicacy and extraordinary powers, A Boy's Own Story is a triumph.
The Beautiful Room is Empty
This sequel to A Boy's Own Story chronicles the late adolescence and early adulthood of the unnamed narrator. Moving from the Midwest to New York, he leads a life that revolves around the pursuit of sexual obsession and his burgeoning intellectual relationships: with Maria, a painter and political activist whose bohemianism shields an ambiguous sexuality; and Lou, addict, advertising copywriter, and compelling guru of sensuality. Student life, journalism, literature, art, the oppression of psychoanalysis, and the birth of gay liberation all contribute to this relentlessly paced and poetically imagined testament to an epoch of change.« less