The Married Man

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by Edmund White


  Gay Studies/Essays/978-0-679-75474-9

  CARACOLE

  In French caracole means “prancing”; in English, “caper.” Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In Caracole, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76416-8

  FORGETTING ELENA

  Forgetting Elena takes place on a privileged island community where manners are everything. Or so it seems to White’s excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator, who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one’s bathroom habits to the composition of “spontaneous” poetry is subject to rigid conventions. But no sooner has he begun to intuit the islands’s Byzantine codes than the mysterious and charismatic Elena is urging him to transgress them, with results that are at once shocking and wickedly funny.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75573-9

  GENET

  Bastard, thief, prostitute, jailbird, Jean Genet was one of French literature’s sacred monsters. In works from Our Lady of the Flowers to The Screens, he created scandalous personal mythology while savaging the conventions of his society. His career was a series of calculated shocks marked by feuds, rootlessness, and the embrace of unpopular causes and outcast peoples. Now this most enigmatic of writers has found his ideal biographer in novelist Edmund White, whose eloquent and often poignant chronicle does justice to the unruly narrative of Genet’s life even as it maps the various worlds in which he lived and the perverse landscape of his imagination.

  Biography/978-0-679-75479-4

  THE MARRIED MAN

  Austin Smith is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. He is pushing fifty, loveless, drifting. One day at the gym he meets Julien: French, an architect, much younger, and married. Against every expectation, this chance acquaintance matures into a relationship of uncommon intensity. In the beginning, the lovers’ only impediments are the easily surmountable and comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. With increasing desperation, in a quest to save health and happiness, they move from the shuttered squares of Venice to sun-drenched Key West, to Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78144-8

  SKINNED ALIVE

  In Skinned Alive, Edmund White measures the distance between an expatriate American and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and “hard” sex; the gulf that separates a man dying of AIDS from his uncomprehending Texas relatives; and the inequality between a young playwright and the coquettish actor who is the object of his adoration. Beautifully written, uncannily observant, and by turns funny, erotic, and heartbreaking, these nine stories are brilliant shards of sensibility and experience, fashioned by one of the finest writers of our time.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75475-6

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2000 by Edmund White

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  White, Edmund, [date]

  The married man / Edmund White.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76448-5

  1. Americans—France—Paris—Fiction.

  2. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Fiction.

  3. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.H463 M37 2000

  813′.54—dc21 99-053980

  v3.0_r1

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