The Unpunished Vice

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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.