The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

By Edmund White

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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
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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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781408870280

Edmund White

<p>Edmund White is the author of the novels <em>Fanny: A Fiction</em>, <em>A Boy's Own Story</em>, <em>The Farewell Symphony</em>, and <em>The Married Man</em>; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, <em>My Lives</em>. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.</p>

Reviews for The Unpunished Vice

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interweaving his reading memories with his autobiography, Edmund White has written an engaging narrative on the importance of reading and books. I enjoyed this book in part because I share his vice - from an early age to the present. Some of his remembered vignettes mirror my own in that I had similar experiences with particular books, perhaps not the same book but certainly much the same result. The totality of his remembrances yields something like what I believe many readers will have experienced - I know that I have.